When defueling of the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility begins, a two-person team will patrol around the facility looking out for fires, leaks and other emergencies.
The group of 68 Army reservists and Hawaiʻi National Guard members are training to fight the fires, call the Federal Fire Department and address other emergencies, according to U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Graham Perry, the operations officer.
"These teams have been within the Red Hill facility, if not every day, every other day training so they are training exactly in the location where they will be expected to conduct their duties," Perry said.
Part of the training is at Ford Island's Naval Submarine Training Center Pacific, where Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer Donovan Hatch is an instructor.
They’re training at a submarine facility because it mimics the enclosed spaces they’ll see at the Red Hill facility.
"We're talking about submarines here, but I'm really talking about enclosed space fires, right? So they're very similar," Hatch said. "There's pipes that run through there's electrical panels, and it's enclosed spaces, so extremely like a submarine."
Some of those training already have firefighting backgrounds, and for others this is their first time doing some of these activities.
Air Force Airman First Class Joshua Benigno volunteered for the mission. He’s from Salt Lake and has been training for the last couple of weeks.
He admitted that he was a little scared the first time he went into the training area with the fire, but that he is becoming less scared as the training progresses.
"We go through four to five scenarios a day, and they progressively get harder and harder because the military works in a crawl, walk, run approach," he said.
During the advanced firefighting training, he described the experiences.
"The fire was pretty big, because they'd come from different portions of the trainer," Benigno said.
"Sometimes there would be this thing called a rollover, where the gases at the top at the ceiling would ignite spontaneously, and a wall of fire would roll over over your head and was incredibly hot," he said.
