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Suffolk Fire and Rescue is in the beginning stages of building the city’s first live fire training facility. Fire Chief Michael Barakey said the building is the first phase of a much larger and long-term vision to build an entire fire safety training center. 

The burn building is estimated to cost around $6.2 million, $480,000 of which was awarded to Suffolk Fire and Rescue through the Virginia Department of Fire Programs. The building will be the first thing to go up on a seven acre plot of land off Carolina Road and is expected to be completed in June or July.

Barakey said it’s been a long-term goal of his to provide a facility that allows Suffolk’s fire department and its regional partners “an opportunity to not only train, but to become more efficient and effective in all of our duties, from firefighting, technical rescue, fine space, trench rescue operations, [and] vehicle education.”    

Steven Henkle, battalion chief of the logistics division, said it will be an 8,500 square foot class A burn building. This means the training fires will be fueled with ordinary combustibles that mimic how real house fires burn.

He said they also tried to copy what an average house looks like when designing the building. It’s two stories with an attic and a porch. He said they even included a large garage-like room to practice car fires.  

Since Suffolk doesn’t have its own fire training facilities, firefighters have to travel to Franklin and Virginia Beach, often daily, to use their training resources, Barakey said. Not only is this expensive, he said, but it also takes those firefighters out of the city for long periods of time.

“It’s going to be great,” Henkle said. “The guys can do in service training, it won’t impact service delivery by taking companies out of service, sending them to Virginia Beach or Franklin. We’re close enough to where we can still respond in an emergency. So this is going to be instrumental for our training.”

Since the building will be partially funded by a state grant, Henkle said the burn building will be a resource to the whole region.

Barakey highlighted the importance of building a regional facility, because there’s currently only three burn buildings in Hampton Roads to serve almost 5,000 career and volunteer firefighters. 

“By adding not only the burn building, but one of the quality that we’re going to build, in a location like in the city of Suffolk, it just allows the Virginia Beach, the Newport News and the Franklin burn buildings not to be so stressed,” Barakey said.

Additionally, he said Suffolk’s burn building will be the most updated out of all of them and will allow other fire departments in the region to train in a modern building. 

Construction of the burn building will also bring electric, gas, and sewer utilities along with communication connectivity, Barakey said, which will make it possible to implement phases two and three of the larger public safety campus vision.

He said phase two will consist of building a classroom so they can run the fire training academy there, as well as other fire and paramedic training. Phase three will be determined once the needs of the department are assessed at that time, Barakey said, as well as access to funding. 

After the burn building, Barakey said they have determined the classroom facility as the second priority. Right now their academy is run out of Portsmouth at St. Julians Creek and is a shared site on a military installation, he added. 

He said that because it will be very expensive to implement everything they want, they are going about it one step at a time and choosing what to focus on based on how important it is to the fire department.