Firefighters keep flames at bay

  • Published
  • By Capt. Brus E. Vidal
  • 376th Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs
MANAS AIR BASE, Kyrgyzstan (AFPN) --  Sixty seconds. Just 60 seconds is all it takes for a fire to decimate a tent in a deployed environment.

But the 376th Air Expeditionary Wing’s team of firefighters is here to prevent that from happening. The team has many missions, but fire prevention is the most critical so the team never has to practice their ultimate discipline, fighting fires.

“Our mission here at Manas Air Base is to protect the lives and property of all the personnel assigned to the 376th AEW,” said Master Sgt. Juan Salas, the team’s noncommissioned officer in charge.

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The department is divided into two different teams, one for the tent city side and one for the flightline side, and its airmen hail from Holloman Air Force Base, N.M., and McChord AFB, Wash.

The tent city team is responsible for all tent city assets and responds to suspicious package situations, working arm-in-arm with explosive ordnance disposal and security forces teams.

There is also one full-time tent city fire inspector. He inspects every tent at least once a month. Sergeant Salas said the inspector looks for anything in tents that might pose a threat -- clutter, overloaded electrical appliances and heaters.

“The facilities that we live in are very, very flammable,” Sergeant Salas said. “If a tent caught fire, it would be gone before we were even notified and you could expect two or three other tents close to it to be up in flames by the time we got there.

“We’d contain the fire, but our main concern would be the rescue of personnel, preventing additional tents from catching fire, then putting the fire out -- life safety, exposures, then the fire,” he said.

With the potential for more explosive situations existing on the flightline side, everything over there is bigger, including the trucks, according to Sergeant Salas. They staff three new, 3,000-gallon crash trucks and one rescue truck, and can fight any type of fire including a large aircraft crash. The team also handles all in-flight emergencies and responds to fuel spills and structural fires on the flightline side.

An in-flight emergency could involve any type of situation a pilot might encounter, including hydraulic and engine failures. Once a troubled aircraft lands, firefighters take necessary emergency actions and, if need be, extract aircrew from the aircraft.

Sergeant Salas considers this one of their most critical tasks, and they practice those skills weekly for Manas’ organic assets -- the KC-135 Stratotanker and C-130 Hercules. He said they also familiarize themselves with other types of aircraft that transit the base.

Practice and training are critical because nearly 80 percent of the firefighters are first-term airmen, many of whom come here well-trained but with little or no experience on the aircraft here.

“We have a lot of young, first-term airmen here, E-4s and below,” Sergeant Salas said. “The inexperience is a unique challenge and we have a lot of airmen filling roles that they wouldn’t normally see for another three or four years at a stateside base, so they’ve had to mature very quickly.

“But, we’ve actually had some fantastic results with these folks filling these advanced positions and our team has grown into a strong unit,” he said.

That success stems from a robust training program. Firefighters from the current air expeditionary force rotation have completed a collective 35 career development courses and earned 18 certifications. They account for nearly 90 percent of the learning resource center’s business here.

“These young troops are quite motivated. They’re hitting the books really hard and trying to learn all they can in rapid fashion,” Sergeant Salas said. “My hat’s off to them because they, along with the staff sergeant supervisors assisting them, do an outstanding job.”

And there are only four staff sergeants here. Rene Garza is one.

“I’ve been an Air Force firefighter for eight years and this is the most challenging environment I’ve been in,” said Sergeant Garza, who was also deployed here last year when he had nine staff sergeants senior to him. “I’m like the third ranking staff here now, so it’s a totally different dynamic.

“We have airmen here who were only on home station for three or four months before they deployed -- still in their first (Career Development Courses),” he said. “It’s important to have everyone completely trained. That way we have a complete fire department rather than one full of guys who are only good for one thing -- riding on the back of the truck.

“We need them to do more than that,” Sergeant Garza said.

The constant training and lots of study time during 48-hour shifts ensures that all airmen of the young team can absolutely do more than that, and in rapid fashion. According to the youngest of those young airmen, 19-year-old Airman Zachary Trimble, there is no better place to learn than here.

“(Almost all the airmen here have) taken their CDCs, so they’re all gung-ho about helping me out,” he said. “I have no distractions and nothing to do with my spare time other than study, so it’s been really good for me and my career.”