September 14, 2018 at 4:11 p.m.
Area firefighters participate in MABAS drill
Area firefighters participate in MABAS drill
In addition to the Arbor Vitae Fire Department, firefighters from Minocqua, Woodruff, Hazelhurst, Lake Tomahawk, Newbold, Pike Lake, Lac du Flambeau, St. Germain, Plum Lake, Boulder Junction and Manitowish Waters participated in the drill, according to Arbor Vitae Fire Chief Mike Van Meter.
According to the MABAS/Wisconsin website, legislation creating MABAS was approved by the state legislature and signed by Gov. Jim Doyle on April 5, 2006.
"The point of MABAS, and why we're using it more prevalently now, is it's designed to take one or two pieces of apparatus from each township so we don't create this big hole within a county during an emergency," Van Meter said. "It's more or less pre-planning your calls is what it is."
A big part of the exercise revolved around testing the efficiency of water supplies for large fires, he said.
"It was also a test of our communications system and good training for Vilas County dispatchers, who ran the exercise as a real call," Van Meter said. "They were actually paging departments as they would in a real situation."
After being dispatched from their respective fire departments, firefighters headed to the Lakeland Airport in Arbor Vitae.
"We were looking for an area where we could spread out because we knew we were gonna have a lot of apparatus traffic moving constantly," Van Meter said. "Because the airport's kind of laid out like city blocks, it worked very well for what we were trying to achieve."
The scenario used in the drill involved a large hangar fire.
"By the end of the scenario, we ended up with three hangars," Van Meter said.
Despite previously being involved in MABAS-related calls, either for training purposes or for real - an example being the large hangar fire at Lake Tomahawk's Dolhun Field in January - the Arbor Vitae Fire Department and the rest of the fire departments in Vilas County didn't technically become a MABAS-certified division until June of this year.
"We started putting it (Vilas County's MABAS division) together in 2013," Van Meter said. "We officially went active on June 1 of this year."
Since then, Arbor Vitae has used MABAS once for a garage fire, Van Meter said.
"We ended up not using the equipment because the fire was pretty much out when we got there, but the the whole plan with this is to get resources moving right away," Van Meter said. "You can always turn them around and send them back."
Brian Jopek may be reached via email at [email protected]
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