Detroit Lakes fire department to apply for federal grant to construct regional fire training facility

Detroit Lakes, Minn. (KDLM) – Detroit Lakes will be applying for a federal grant to cover construction costs of a new regional firefighter training facility for west-central Minnesota fire departments.

The fire training building would provide customizable, live-flame experiences for firefighters from across the lakes area and create a possible revenue stream through rentals from nearby departments to offset some of the costs of maintaining the facility.

Detroit Lakes Fire Chief Mike Hanson described how the new trainer would be used.

“We can design it so we can light most of this building on fire over and over, over two or three decades, so long as we keep up with maintenance on it,” said Hanson. “Also, we can design it for repelling, for roof operations, for confined space training, for man hole training. It comes with moveable doors, moveable hallways … and obviously, we’re going to light it on fire so it’d be very easy for the police department to come in and do some room clearing drills or anything with some munitions, it’s easy to set that kind of thing up as well. So it’s not just a fire department use building, that’s obviously the main use, but it can be used by other city departments as well.”

Detroit Lakes Fire Facility price quotes and photos by Michael Achterling on Scribd

Hanson told members of the city’s public safety committee that, currently, city firefighters would have to travel to Brainerd or Bismarck for the same type of training and it isn’t very cost effective because they would have to take their trucks and all their gear to the training as well.

He also said by making the grant application regionally focused it would increase their chances of receiving the funding.

“We’d do it as a regional grant so we’d pull in all the surrounding fire departments, not just from Becker County, but we’d try to pull in some of the closer departments in Otter Tail County as well,” said Hanson. “The reason we’d do that as a regional grant instead just a city grant is that the more firefighters you have a your grant application, the better you score.”

The three fire training facility quotes presented by Hanson range in total costs between $700,000 to $1.35 million. However, he added, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Assistance to Firefighters grant program would cover 95% of the total costs for the building with local entities covering the remaining 5% of the cost.

Hanson also said fire trainers are becoming more necessary because of the state and federal regulations involving the burning of derelict structures.

“Another proponent of this is that it’s getting more difficult to burn old structures,” he said. “The MPCA and EPA are really cracking down on how those need to be burned and what needs to be taken out of them, which is essentially everything at this point.”

Hanson told the committee members the grant application portal only opens for one month over the winter, so he wanted to receive the city council’s preliminary approval to start putting the application materials together.

He also added the national grant has a lot of competition for its funds from across the country, but he’s hopeful a selection committee would see the area’s need for their own regional fire trainer.