By David Eck
Enquirer contributor

EDITOR'S NOTE: David Eck is a contributing reporter for the Enquirer and a firefighter/emergency medical technician with the Liberty Township Fire Department.

COLERAIN TOWNSHIP - Crouched on hands and knees in a small room, I can see the warning signs.

Thick black smoke obscures the firefighter a foot in front of me. The temperature rises sharply and is well over 300 degrees at the level of our heads. "Fingers" of flame dance in the smoke. Suddenly an orange glow flashes as the fire erupts.

I am thinking this is how Cincinnati firefighter Oscar Armstrong III died in March.

Colerain Township firefighters spent last week training in a simulator that creates fire flashovers, a phenomenon in which so much heat builds up in a room that superheated gases ignite simultaneously.

I trained with Colerain firefighters in the simulator on Friday. It was my first experience in such a simulator, though I constantly train on fire and rescue techniques as a Liberty Township firefighter.

Inside the simulator, the temperature rises again and there is another flashover. I can feel the heat sear the back of my neck and face even though I am covered head to toe in my turnout gear and an air pack.

I have wondered what hell is like and perhaps this is it.

The simulator we used belongs to the Ohio Fire Academy and is moved around the state for training, Colerain Township Fire Capt. Bill Zoz said.

The training - including 90 minutes of classroom lecture in addition to live fires in the simulator - teaches firefighters to watch for the flashover conditions: excessively dark smoke, a quick intense rise in temperature and "fingers" of fire in the smoke.

Those fingers mean the gases inside the room have superheated enough to catch fire themselves - and when a flashover occurs, whatever is in there is unlikely to survive.

But even if you know what to look for, the signs appear so quickly firefighters have only seconds to get out. Ohio trains firefighters to go into a blaze where pre-flashover signs exist only if victims might be inside - and to only crawl in far enough to be able to get out in 3-5 seconds.

The training is "designed to give firefighters an understanding of fire behavior," Zoz said. "We try to focus on the one event out of fire behavior which is lethal to firefighters, which is flashover. It's a specific event."

Cincinnati firefighters are waiting for their own flashover training simulator. The equipment should arrive next month.

Jason Edwards, who works part-time for both Colerain and Green townships, had not been through a flashover training before last week.

"It surprised me how much heat could build up so fast," he said. "It gave me an idea of what to look for."

"It really hit home as far as safety," said Chris Klug, a part-time firefighter with Colerain and Delhi townships. "It relates to Oscar Armstrong. If we can come away with anything from Oscar's tragedy, it's that we (always) need to be more careful."

E-mail daveck@fuse.net