WASILLA - Flashlight in hand, lighting his way Saturday through the darkened Cottonwood Creek Mall, Kirk Gibbs came across a group of people pounding a prying tool into a doorjamb in a back room behind a store.
Gibbs asked if he could step in and took the group’s Halligan tool, a metal rod topped with a spike-wedge combo. He showed them a quicker, more forceful way to enter: Swing the spike into the jamb and pull back hard once it’s driven in.
“You’re trying to hit a home run,” Gibbs said.
He handed back the tool and sure enough, the trick worked.
“I can’t believe they’re tearing this place down,” Gibbs, 42, said later. “I was 20 when they built it.”
Gibbs, a battalion chief at the Central Mat-Su Fire Department, teaches a class on forcible entry. He was among a few dozen firefighters at the mall cutting the roof open, knocking holes in the walls, spraying water and learning techniques to battle a large-scale fire most will never have to fight.
A mall-sized fire is a far cry from the small residential fires that make up the bulk of structure fires fought in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, said Johnny Murdock, the borough emergency services training coordinator. Murdock, on scene Saturday, played the role of safety officer.
“Everything in something like this is just bigger, heavier than your normal structure,” Murdock said.
NO BLAZES, NO BLASTING
“You can train and train and train, but until you actually get a roof like this or walls like this, it’s not the same,” said Central Mat-Su Fire Department fire code inspector Rich Boothby.
The mall, slated for demolition to make way for a new Target store, is in the firefighters’ hands until Thursday, said Boothby, who worked with the mall owners to get permission to rip the place up.
“The only thing they said I couldn’t do was burn it or use explosives,” Boothby said Saturday on a loading dock where he’d come to cut padlocks from breaker boxes and make sure all the power to the building was off.
The final OK came down Friday. Boothby quickly extended invitations to Anchorage, Chugiak and all fire departments in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough.
Saturday the Anchorage, Palmer, Big Lake, Meadow Lakes and Central Mat-Su fire departments turned out. Boothby said he expected more would trickle through during the week.
Even if a mall like Cottonwood Creek catches fire, the sprinklers will likely have it contained or extinguished before firefighters arrive, Murdock said.
But if the sprinklers are turned off or for some other reason a space like this does catch fire, firefighters on scene often learn as they go, Murdock said. It’s rare to get a chance to prepare like this.
The mall is built in a fashion similar to most big box stores, Boothby said. Indeed, skills learned this weekend would likely help fight a fire in the Target that’s due to replace it.
And elements of the training, such as the “trench cut” that firefighters made in the roof - a technique that allows them to take a stand and hold a fire to a certain section of a building, saving the remaining portion - have been utilized in the past, Gibbs pointed out.
Most recently, firefighters tried to cut one in the roof of Su Valley High School, but were stymied by multiple roofs. The school burned down.
ONCE IN A LIFETIME
The mall exercise is also a chance to practice getting in and out of large, smoke-filled rooms, Gibbs said. The old Alaska Marketplace space had firefighters crawling along the length of a hose line, a technique used to find one’s way out of a fire.
And they could train in spaces not as wide open, such as the maze of rooms that was once a hair salon near the mall center. Firefighters donned masks to guard against artificial smoke and went inside looking for the department’s rescue dummy.
All in all, Boothby, Murdock and Gibbs agreed, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Though they have to be out of the mall by Thursday to make way for its imminent destruction, “if they were going to wait a month we’d be here every day,” Murdock said.
Find Andrew Wellner at adn.com/contacts/awellner or call 352-6710.
