On Thursday morning, leaders of St. Mary Parish attended the groundbreaking of Franklin Fire Department’s $580,000 fire training tower facility.
Franklin Fire Department Chief Chuck Bourgeois said this has been in the works for three to four years and the desire to boost fire ratings was one of the reasons behind it.
“We had issues with our ratings, starting losing points in areas that we couldn’t control,” Bourgeois said.
“So we had to figure out a new way to get some type of points in the ratings to keep our scores up, so we can keep the fire insurance down for the citizens of our community.”
The facility will be located behind the Edward Bodin Fire Station #2 at Landry Park. Bourgeois said the facility offers hands-on training for the fire department. It will also be used by neighboring fire departments including Centerville, Cypremort Point, and Baldwin.
“You’re gonna see a three-story steel structure facility,” Bourgeois said.
“It’s gonna have additions such as burn rooms on it where we can actually do live burns with fire. “It’s gonna have a smoke generating system, it’s also gonna have a sprinkler system train them on how to fight fire.”
The Town of Baldwin Mayor Clarence Vappie said it’s cost-efficient for the Baldwin Volunteer Fire Department because it prevents fire department trainees from traveling long distances to get the training they need.
“Baton Rogue or wherever the conferences were,” Vappie said. “And of course, we had to pay per diems mileage and the tuition of fees also. It means a lot as fire safety goes, fire safety lower ratings.”
Bourgeois said this the facility also prevents the department from losing staff to go elsewhere for training.
“Most of our training was being done in-house but without any type of structures to you know actually have live burns in,” Bourgeois said.
“So they couldn’t get the hands-on training, so we’d have to send them to Baton Rouge or fire departments in other parishes that would leave us short-handed.”
Franklin Fire Department Assistant Fire Chief Justin Martin said he’s grateful to have a facility right here in his city, after having to train in neighboring parishes.
“It’s being able to actually do our job in a safe environment,” Martin said.
“I work part-time with FEDA the state fire marshal fire training school and they’re very limited on the resources they can get here. So to actually have something that’s our own and we can train doing our job in a safe environment.”
Mayor Foulcard expressed his excitement for being able to work with neighboring towns and said this will benefit homeowners.
“Many homeowners are being faced with extremely high insurance costs and this is one of the ways you could lower some of those insurance costs down with fire ratings,” Foulcard said. “So we’re very very excited about this endeavor.”
Bourgeois said the facility should be up and ready for use of training by the end of March.
