The Boy Scout motto “be prepared” also applies to the Great Bend Fire Department, Fire Chief Brent Smith told the City Council Monday night as he outlined improvements taking place at his department’s training facility behind Fire Station 2.

“We’ve been working with Hazmat Response, our neighbor to the west of us out there station,” Smith said. The business has “been nothing but generous in donating equipment and time to do some dirt work and hauling some buildings for us to add to our burn facility.”

In addition, “we’re going to be putting in a grain elevator rescue props and some confined space stuff,” he said. “We’ve eventually going to expand into some hazardous material stuff with a tank car from the railroad.”

The training ground expansion is a multiple-phase project that is made possible by having community partners like Haz-Mat Response, who want to see Great Bend Fire have the best training facility in our region, he said..

“Exciting things are happening at the Great Bend Fire Department,” Smith said. “Good things are happening out there.”

“I’ve worked with some of that with insurance and the training for that,” said Ward 2 Councilwoman Jolene Biggs. “I was just reading an article recently where there’s been a lot more claims for those confined space cases. So additional training is very good.”

“We can’t get enough training,” Smith said. “One thing I really stress is we’ve got to be prepared for everything because our closest neighbors that have that training are a long ways away. So we need to be able to help our citizens as best we can.”