As of August, the Beaumont, Texas, Fire/Rescue Training Center is back open, nearly a year after heavy flooding during Hurricane Harvey forced its closure.
The Beaumont City Council voted unanimously in April to grant a 20-year lease on the 45-acre city-owned facility to Industrial Rescue Instruction Systems Inc., a Beaumont-based company specializing in training for industrial emergency responders.
Industrial Rescue owner David Owens said the reopened school is now operating under the name Industrial Rescue Fire Training Field.
“This was an opportunity we had been looking for,” Owens said. “The city offered the school to us in 2002, but we weren’t big enough at the time.”
In business for over 50 years, Industrial Rescue has since continued to grow, with international recognition and plenty of experience under its belt.
After Hurricane Harvey unleashed incredible amounts of torrential rain in 2017, reports of flood damage to the field were widespread. However, Owens said, other than replacing ruined equipment and the temporary buildings previously used as classrooms, little was damaged that could not be set right “with a new coat of paint.”
“If you toured the complex today, you would have a hard time telling it was ever underwater,” Owens said.
Owens, who invested a significant amount of money to reopen the school, said the project was largely a matter of “sentimental value” to him: “Our family has had three generations train on this field,” he said.
He personally became familiar with the complex first as a student and then as an instructor for 19 years before taking charge of Industrial Rescue in 1999.
“The ultimate goal for me is to be able to give this school back to the emergency response community, like it was 20 years ago,” Owens said.
Founded in 1966 under the name Beaumont Fire Grounds, the recently reopened complex includes 14 live-fire training projects, full-sized simulations of the industrial units responders would confront in an actual emergency. Other training props available on the grounds are used in training for high-angle and confined-space rescue and handling hazardous materials.
Owens said he plans to consolidate all Industrial Rescue training in Beaumont at the reopened fire school, tripling the number of training projects for rescue and doubling the number used for hazardous materials training. Training at the reopened school will be conducted by Industrial Rescue instructors.
Owens also plans to renew the fire field’s lengthy affiliation with the Lamar Institute of Technology at nearby Lamar University.
His plan to quickly reopen the field following Harvey meant staff and contractors had to meet aggressive deadlines to get the fire field ready, Owens said.
“Fortunately, we’ve been planning this since November,” he said. “We’ve got a plan laid out. It’s actually come together pretty quick.”
A quick reopening left little time to market the school to industrial fire brigades across the country that were forced to book training elsewhere after the sudden closing. However, Team IRIS Rescue, Industrial Rescue’s sister company, will have a big role in getting the word out. It provides personnel for on-site emergency response training both nationally and internationally.
“I’ve already been contacted by teams overseas,” Owens said. “They’re excited about utilizing the field.
“We’ve never had a desire to be the biggest company out there, but a driven vision for quality training has been our goal. Relationships built on meeting and maintaining our goal is the reason why we’ve been successful in the emergency response community for 51 years.”
For more information, visit www.industrialrescue.com or call (409) 924-0710.
