The ribbon is cut — or rather, burned — for the Cranberry Township Volunteer Fire Company's new burn building training facility during a ceremony Tuesday at the township's Public Safety Training Center. The custom-designed facility allows members to train and hone firefighting skills in a realistic, three-story building that has forcible entry doors and is 100% burnable.

CRANBERRY TWP — They like it so much they built it twice.

That's what Scott Garing, Cranberry Township's chief of fire and emergency services, quipped Tuesday night at the ribbon-burning of the Cranberry fire department's burn building training facility.

The grand unveiling of a building years in the making by the Cranberry Township Volunteer Fire Company — and one Garing said they accidentally built backward the first time — showed to the public the fire department's newest tool: A stack of storage containers in which they can practice fighting fires and rescuing entrapped persons.

And as a fire department, they weren't content with an old-fashioned ribbon-cutting; instead, fire company president Daniel Kane and division chief Michael Hanks used a torch to cut through the symbolic ribbon in front of the structure.

Cranberry's red burn building, Garing said, allows firefighters to train in situations as realistic as possible by simulating fires and smoke and presenting firefighters with different situations in which they may find themselves.

Garing said the burn building is important to the fire company — and to others in the region — because the companies respond to more fires than ever in the past, and because fires are different now than they have been. “Occupants in legacy-type construction — which was built in the 1950s, '60s, '70s — have five times the amount of time to get out of a structure fire than they do today,” he said. “Individuals today have three to five minutes to get themselves out of a burning building before they potentially succumb to the toxic environment.”

Training firefighters to more effectively and more efficiently respond to a fire while they are on scene can make a big difference in determining whether the occupants live or die. Garing said 63% of fire rescue victims located by a search prior to fire control, or roughly within eight minutes, survive; that falls to 39% if they're found after fire control.

“The fires require faster operations,” he said. “It requires hustle and fast, progressive thinking with more people than ever on scene early to solve the problem. That's exactly what this device is going to do for us.”

Among the tools inside the burn building are slots at which firefighters can hang drywall to more realistically simulate the conditions inside of a structure fire, as well as a maze to prepare them for navigating in the dark, smoky atmosphere of a burning building. It also has tools for simulating the rescue of people trapped.

“The key is the repetition of those skills so we can get faster, we get better, as a unit,” Garing said following the unveiling.