A shipping and receiving building at Butler County Community College will be demolished by a controlled burn June 6. Firefighters will use the occasion as a learning opportunity.

Butler County Community College is hosting a unique training drill for firefighters June 6.

The college is demolishing an old wooden shipping and receiving building via a controlled burn that morning, but before its destruction firefighters will get a close look at how this type of structure burns, and how they contain this type of burn.

“We'll have crews outside ready to go,” said Kevin Smith, coordinator of fire and HazMat training programs at BC3. “They come in and see how that fire grows, how it burns and how they are able to put that out.”

According to Brian Opitz, executive director of operations at BC3, the college plans to construct a new nursing and allied health education building on the south end of campus, where the old building is located.

While the college would normally just demolish a building, Smith said the Butler County Chiefs Association normally hosts a controlled burn workshop on campus in early June. The association and college then began obtaining the necessary permits to perform the drill.

The process includes an inspection from an officer with the Department of Environmental Protection, and approval from Butler Township.

“There's a lot of prior work to make sure everything is done safely,” Opitz said. Smith said that while typical fire school training drills are educational, burning the actual structure of a building will be a more realistic scenario for firefighters.

“Our burn building on campus, it's a solid concrete building,” Smith said. “All we're burning there is straw and pallets. Here you're going to have parts of the building on fire.”

Smith said the burn will begin around 9 a.m. June 6, and be over around 1 p.m. Opitz said this is one situation when seeing smoke doesn't require someone to call emergency responders.

“It's a very safe operation and controlled operation,” he said.