Recently there was a collaboration between Crookston High School Advanced Woods teacher Travis Oliver and the Crookston Fire Department on a project that could be used as a training piece for the department. The project is a Dollhouse/Firehouse or a four-compartment Palmer Box. When Oliver was asked to complete the training piece he asked for a volunteer from his class to take on the project and Senior Tim Brule volunteered.
“Trav, my woods teacher actually introduced the project to me and I volunteered to work on it,” says Brule. “It was great; it was a fun time to work on it. It gave me a good challenge to work on too.” Admittedly the project did take longer than Brule thought it would. Just how long did it take? “Roughly three weeks. It was a lot of designing on the CNC,” says Brule. “But once I got it all cut out it didn’t take too long to put it together.” There was a lot to learn from doing this project and it wasn’t just how to design and build. “I learned to use the CNC a little better and it was actually a pretty cool idea here,” says Brule. “It’s actually for the department as a smoke show. It basically shows how smoke moves through a house and you remove and add panels to demonstrate how smoke moves through it.”
Firefighter Garrett Bengtson had asked Mr. Oliver if he would work on this project in his class and intends to invite Oliver and the class to come to the station when they train with it. Bengtson explained how using this training tool will help Firefighters. “This focuses on fire behavior and fire dynamics. Fire dynamics is the study of how a fire starts, spreads, and develops and fire behavior is the way the fire reacts and behaves in this environment,” says Bengtson. “Controlling that ventilation opening is very important on the fire realm because we need to avoid creating a flow path until it is necessary for rescuers for extinguishment.”
Having the Palmer Box to train with is a better way to learn about ventilation than reading or watching videos Bengtson says. “Most firefighters are visual learners and are less inclined to sit in a classroom reading words on a slide presentation. That’s why I reached out to Travis Oliver to see if there were any students interested in helping the fire department with this project and when it was complete they would get to essentially participate in the training here at the department when we put the prop to use.”
This is truly a wonderful example of Crookston working together to enhance education and public safety.
