The Pella Fire Department held a live-situation training exercise near downtown Pella Thursday evening.

Jeremy Scott is the department’s training coordinator; he tells KRLS News it’s rare for the firefighters to have a chance to train in situations involving actual structures.

“We don’t have live fire going on in there, but we do have a barrel with straw that we’ve smoked the entire house up with,” he says. “Our guys are going to be able to go in and search the entire house for whatever we might put in there–we might put a dummy in there, or there might not be anything, but it’s able to let them have a real life scenario instead of just what we get typically in here for our fire training.”

He says most of the department was in attendance to hone their skills in a simulation close to what they would see in a house fire.

“With chainsaws, we’re able to go onto this roof, because with firefighting when we can make interior attacks, most of it’s really smoky so we can’t see,” he says. “So we have to do a vertical ventilation or sometimes a horizontal ventilation. With a vertical ventilation on this house, we’re going to be able to cut into the roof and make several cuts to practice so that our guys can get that experience and just be able to get out there and put their hands on the tools without it being a real emergency.”

The building at the corner of East 1st and Liberty in Pella is set for demolition after the city purchased the house in May of 2017. No formal plans have been approved for the site.