Lowcountry fire departments team up to practice water shuttling

BEAUFORT COUNTY, Ga. (WTOC) - Before the hot temperatures hit Beaufort County Monday, firefighters in the area were training for situations where they are not near a fire hydrant to fight a fire.

In Beaufort County near Seabrook there is no immediate access to fire hydrants, which can make the jobs of firefighters a little more difficult.

“Particularly down here in the Seabrook/Grays Hill there are not a lot of hydrants,” said Burton Assistant Fire Chief Dan Byrne.

To combat this, fire departments have been practicing water shuttling.

In this training, a crew from Sheldon Fire stationed at a fire hydrant to fill their 2,000-gallon tanker. Once they filled it up, the tanker would then drive over to two dump tanks, or pools that the Burton Fire District had set up near the scene of the hypothetical fire, where they would back up to the pools and firefighters would empty the tanker into the pools to replenish the water supply that was being used to fight the fire.

While this is happening, another firefighter was monitoring water pressure to make sure they were not losing water and when one group finished the exercise, the groups would trade spots and start from the beginning.

Burton Assistant Fire Chief Dan Byrne said this training is crucial for their department and gives them a great opportunity to work with another department.

“It’s highly synchronized, it’s really about timing and making sure there is enough to fill the tanks and the water keeps flowing. This is something we must train on repeatedly. Everybody has to know what their responsibility is and what the people to the left and right what their responsibilities are. This makes sure we don’t lose those seconds and lose our water supply,” said Chief Byrne.

Byrne said this training also gives new firefighters from Burton and Sheldon a chance to train for this scenario in case the need arises.