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Training helps Grand Canyon airport fire crews prepare for anything

Training helps Grand Canyon airport fire crews prepare for anything

June 26, 2019

By David Rookhuyzen / ADOT Communications

Grand Canyon Airport Firefighter Training

As they say, hope for the best but prepare for the worst. That's something the firefighters at the ADOT-operated Grand Canyon National Park Airport in Tusayan have taken to heart.

The crew, which is housed at the airport and is called out to about 60 incidents a year, has done extensive training in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and California. As we said in a recent news release, earlier this year the crew was put through its paces at the San Bernardino Regional Emergency Training Center.

You can see in the slideshow above just a glimpse of what it was like to train on the center's full-sized mock-ups that simulate a variety of hazardous situations on the both the exterior and interior of a plane. The team had to practice adjusting their techniques and putting out fires for each scenario, while exercising the same caution they would for the real thing.

The Grand Canyon National Park Airport is the state's fourth-busiest, serving more than 336,000 passengers in 2017, the last year for which figures are available, It also is a local hub for tourists wishing to experience the park via air tours. The airport hosts six air-tour companies that fly visitors over the canyon, hosts a skydiving company and sees daily commercial flights from airlines based in the Las Vegas region.