NY Firefighters Want to Burn Vacant Houses for Training

Clay, N.Y. — Some of the 38 homes at the site of Micron Technology’s future $100 billion semiconductor factory in Clay may end up being burned to the ground.

The Clay Fire Department has asked for permission to burn some of the homes on Burnet Road as a training exercise for its 35 volunteer firefighters. Onondaga County officials, who are making plans to demolish the homes to clear the land for Micron, say they are open to letting firefighters burn some of them.

Clay Fire Chief Michael Redhead said seven other volunteer fire departments, mostly in Syracuse’s northern suburbs, have also expressed an interest in conducting “controlled burns” and other training exercises in some of the homes.

The Clay Fire Department built a training tower 20 years behind its Station 1 on Route 31. It sets hay and wooden pallets on fire in a room in the tower so firefighters can practice extinguishing the flames.

However, Redhead said burning a house provides much more realistic training because it allows firefighters to see how smoke and flames spread through a real home and gives them a chance to not only practice putting a fire out, but also conducting search and rescue operations in a structure they are not familiar with.

“We can watch the smoke travel through different rooms and kind of, you know, just watch the fire grow and let them see the way fire travels,” he said. “It’s educational. We’re not looking to get up there and burn houses to cause a lot of chaos.”

Even after a home is burned, it is useful for training purposes because new fire investigators learning how to determine the cause and origin of fires can go through them and employ what they have learned in a classroom, he said.

“I’d like each fire department to have their own house to be able to do what they wish to do with it,” said Redhead.

The opportunity to burn a real home does not come along very often, he said. The last time the Clay department got the chance to burn a home was about 12 years ago, he said.

“It could be another 20 years or we might never get another opportunity like this,” he said.

The Onondaga County Industrial Development Agency has purchased most of the homes on Burnet Road to expand its White Pine Commerce Park. Micron, the world’s fourth largest maker of semiconductors and only U.S.-based maker of memory chips, announced Oct. 4 it plans to build a $100 billion chip fabrication plant at White Pine. The facility would be the largest semiconductor factory in the U.S.

Micron says the plant will create 9,000 high-paying Micron jobs over 20 years and more than 40,000 other jobs at suppliers that will want to locate close to the facility.

Pat Hogan, the development agency’s chairman, said he supports the fire departments’ request.

“There’s no more valuable experience than doing something like that in a real house,” he said. “It’s a good use of the properties.”

Robert Petrovich, the county’s economic development director and the development agency’s executive director, said he has asked the agency’s lawyers to draw up the necessary agreements to allow the fire departments to burn some of the homes slated for demolition. He said he would like to see each interested department get a house to burn.

“We’re absolutely going to do that to the extent that we can,” he said.

He said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has also requested permission to use the homes for training purposes. The county Sheriff’s Office SWAT team has already used some of the homes for training, he said. Law enforcement agencies often use vacant structures to practice forced entries and searching for suspects.

The county development agency recently engaged the Ramboll engineering firm to prepare bid packages for the demolition of homes on the road. Before they can be demolished or burned, they must be inspected and any asbestos removed, Petrovich said.

The agency has not set a deadline for demolishing the homes. Micron has said it wishes to begin site work in 2023, with construction of its semiconductor plant starting in 2024.

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