Firefighter training facility shut down over structural safety fears, carcinogenic smoke risk

Firefighter trainers fearing for the safety of new recruits have shut down Fire and Emergency's only operable facility for training inside burning buildings.

RNZ can reveal specialist trainers in September refused to put a new batch of recruits into the live-fire cells at the national training centre in Rotorua.

The cells comprise steel containers inside a larger building meant to contain all the smoke, and a 'reburner' that purifies the smoke before it is released.

The trainers issued a safety warning notice. The acting manager of national training centres at the time, Joe Stanley, had shut the cells down knowing it was coming.

The provisional improvement notice, or PIN, in force at Rotorua states that Fire and Emergency (FENZ) "is knowingly exposing workers to harm" from the risk of the structural failure of the steel fire cells, and "carcinogen exposure from uncontrolled release of smoke".

"The facility has not address [sic] the breakdown of the integrity of the burn cells," the official notice said.

Stanley said the containers had warped and had holes, the reburner had mostly never worked and the whole big building leaked smoke out across the training ground and into classrooms.

'We can't protect them'

It was a two-pronged threat, he said.

"One is the immediate health and safety concern for our firefighters who are exposed to carcinogenic smoke when they don't need to be.

"The second is our firefighters will end their course and go into real-world environments in their fire brigades in the metropolitan centres and they may not have a thorough understanding of how to behave in live fire," said Stanley, who is also national president of the Professional Firefighters' Union, which is in a longrunning industrial dispute with FENZ.

"We can't protect them from what the real world looks like.

"If we can't do that, then that puts our firefighters and the community at risk."

Unable to complete training at Rotorua, the latest cohort of recruits are instead headed next week to Auckland Airport's live-fire facility, RNZ was told.

Stanley said a far better option of sending them to Adelaide was set up then cancelled.

Repairs did not work - PIN

The PIN said FENZ was notified "on multiple occasions" but had not properly monitored the cells' integrity and that "repairs that have been carried out have not fixed the integrity of the burn cells".

Recruits in the grounds and classrooms outside the cells did not know they might breathe toxic smoke but FENZ did, said Stanley; asked if that was an ethical issue, he said, "Yes, it is, yep."

"I was acting as the manager of training at that time, that was my third day, and that was one of my first actions, was to close the live-fire cells."

Actually fixing them was well outside his control, he added.

'Demonstrated our ability to continue critical training'

Fire and Emergency late on Thursday night said in a statement that once the PIN notice was issued, contingency planning looked at options to deliver the current recruit course.

"While we have restrictions on our live fire training capability, the planning we have undertaken to deliver the current recruits' course demonstrated our ability to continue critical training," it said.

"This has taken significant effort by our (NZPFU) live-fire specialists, safety health and wellbeing, and Learning and Development leadership teams."

FENZ routinely celebrates online about the two dozen recruits who graduate at Rotorua from a 12-week course, usually run four times a year.

FENZ's only other live-fire site at Woolston was also shut down over smoke leaking out, early this year.

This left the country without live-fire training capacity.

'Embarrassing'

Stanley said FENZ chief executive Kerry Gregory cancelled sending the latest Rotorua cohort to Adelaide at the "11th hour", after all the recruits had got passports.

Training at Auckland was a far inferior option to Adelaide, he said.

"I think it's embarrassing that we have to go to Auckland Airport.

"I think it's embarrassing that as New Zealand's only statutory fire and emergency-mandated organisation, we can't teach our people one of the greatest risks that they face every day."

Rotorua was labelled "state-of-the art" in 2012, a "mock town built from concrete and galvanised steel", five years after the $7 million training centre was established. The Defence Force just in June this year also called it a "state-of-the-art facility"; its firefighters were training there at the time.

But Stanley said his trainers reported its degradation over several years "without any additional resource".

The steel cell floors had buckled so they were undulating - "The danger is in that the floor shifts."

Rebuild suggested

The PIN notice listed recommendations made by a health and safety representative at Rotorua. One was that if FENZ could not put engineering controls in place at the live-fire cells, they should be redesigned and rebuilt.

Stanley said resourcing that was up to the chief executive, who knew the cells needed rebuilding.

"I think it's easier to kick the can down the road than it is to do anything about it."

At Woolston, a tender went out in April to build an extraction system "to better capture smoke from all containers and minimise fugitive releases that do not currently exit via the chimney". That work is still going on and the PIN remains in force.

FENZ has now embarked on a restructure at least at corporate level, to try to save $50m a year; Gregory told staff it had to slow or stop some activities, but in public statements the agency said the change would not impact frontline staffing.

Stanley expressed alarm at the savings push.

"It's very difficult to get an answer from anyone about what structural changes [they] need to make," he said.

"We're trying to rebuild an aeroplane as we're flying it, and it's putting us in a really precarious situation."

He said management's plan at Rotorua appeared to be to swap out the live-fire steel containers for new ones, but trainers had told him this was not good enough.

The union in July said one health and safety issue behind its calls for strike action was FENZ's failure to maintain live-fire training facilities.

This had "resulted in only one facility nationwide leaving some firefighters without live fire training for many years", the PFU said.

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