In full gear on a hot day, Firefighter Anthony Vitale crawled through a narrow opening between wall studs and across a slab of plywood in a vacant motel room.
Suddenly, the plywood gave way, spilling Vitale onto his side on the floor.
Luckily, for Vitale, it was not the real thing. It was a simulation of what it would feel like if the floor of a burning building collapsed beneath him, part of a department-wide training exercise Thursday morning in the vacant, single-story motel rooms behind the Howard Johnson Hotel on Boston Post Road.
The "Mayday Training" was designed to prepare city firefighters how to react if trapped while battling a fire, whether they're dropped into a basement, caught in an attic with nowhere to go, or buried under a fallen ceiling, said Capt. Christopher Zak, training officer and fire spokesman.
Thursday marked the first of three phases, which will include training other firefighters how to rescue a comrade in trouble, as well as to prepare commanding officers and dispatchers how to do their parts in orchestrating a "Mayday" response, said Assistant Chief Robert Healey.
"The idea is to save lives, and that's what we're looking at," he said, adding that department officials are grateful to hotel management for allowing the training, which even brought dispatchers to the scene.
Vitale said he and other firefighters were rotated through different challenges during the roughly three-hour training, "so it's kind of a surprise when you get in there."
"Any time you train, if you can get the conditions as close to what we would see in the field, it's helpful," he said. "You never plan on falling through a floor. You think you have it -- you have a plan -- and then there's a curveball. We train for the curveballs, essentially. Train for the worst, hope for the best."
Firefighters have been known to delay calls for help and try to get out of a sticky situation on their own to avoid being the brunt of teasing the next day, Zak said.
He'd like to see protocols so clearly defined that there's no room for personal interpretation, hence drills on how to request help -- a firefighter in trouble should call "Mayday" and offer location, unit, surrounding conditions, actions taken and those needed -- and how to give it.
"We're trying to put them in a situation where they react automatically," he said. "Like muscle memory." The field training was followed by classroom training later in the day, he added.
The last time a Milford firefighter lost contact and got disoriented in a building was Sept. 9, 1989, when a massive inferno consumed Sante's Manor banquet hall on Naugatuck Avenue. The lost man called for help, and firefighters came through the back of the building and found him quickly, Zak said.
The last time a floor collapsed under city firefighters was during last December's fatal Brookdale Avenue fire. The burning house didn't have a full basement in that spot, so firefighters fell only about three feet, he said.
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