ZFD Firefighters Train Inside Condemned Home

ZANESVILLE, Ohio — An abandoned & condemned two-story house at 660 Carey Street, near Pine St. & Pershing Rd. in Zanesville served as a training structure for the Zanesville Fire Dept. on Friday.

“The city has taken this house over and we’re getting ready to demolish it. The good thing about that is once we find out about these houses, we’re able to come in and do some training. Real life training that doesn’t happen by crawling around the fire station,” says Doug Hobson, Zanesville Fire Dept. Asst. Chief.

The house has been abandoned for several years. It’s been in a state of disrepair since being abandoned. Its window awnings are falling down and its front porch is crumbling down.

“Today, we have this house on Carey St., we’ll be smoking the house up, we have a smoke machine, and the guys will be concentrating on search and rescue, downed firefighter, hose movement, being able to take a pressurized hose to the second story, doing the search also with a little bit more of the realistic feel instead of just crawling around on the apparatus floor,” Hobson added.

Part of the training included filling the upstairs with smoke, which could be seen pouring from the broken upstairs windows, attracting the attention of a few neighbors.