By Gordon Lambie
The Sherbrooke Fire Department was hard at work on Thursday morning trying to set a building on fire. While that might seem a little backwards, the Chief of the Sherbrooke fire department’s risk management division, Danny Robitaille, explained that the exercise was part of a plan that goes back to 2018 to film a series of educational videos on fire safety.
“It is really an extraordinary project,” Robitaille said. “There will be 13 fire prevention video capsules prepared from what we have filmed over the course of the last week, and these capsules will be used as educational material on social media, but also before film screenings and in schools.”
Working in partnership with a film crew and students from the Centre-24-Juin trade school, the firefighters have been staging a range of different kinds of fires in a specially built house in the lot behind the Jacques-Denault fire station in Rock-Forest. According to Robitaille, the project has focused on the types of fires that happen most commonly in the city, such as cooking fires, electrical fires, cigarette butts in a planter, barbecue fires, brush fires, and curtains on heaters.
“At this point it has been three of four times that we’ve set (the house) on fire in different areas and then put it out,” the firefighter said with a laugh.
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