Jefferson County firefighters team up with Black Hills Energy to learn how to combat natural gas blazes

FAIRBURY - Life safety. Scene stabilization. Property preservation. Those are a firefighter's three main priorities at the scene of any fire. But when natural gas is involved in a blaze, things can get a bit more challenging.

That's why first responders in Jefferson County teamed up with Black Hills Energy for a very hands-on and rather fiery training session in October, teaching best practices for combatting these particular types of blazes. 

The sky above the Jefferson County Fairgrounds was alight on a Tuesday night in October when a few dozen firefighters from Southeast Nebraska teamed up with Black Hills Energy for a very hands-on demonstration of how to combat natural gas fires.

"Take a little bit of what they know, and a lot of what we know, and combine the two," said Arlen Thompson, Black Hills' training instructor. "Some fire departments will say, it’s a house fire, it’s my jurisdiction – we don’t want to be fighting each other out on a scene, we want to be working together. They know what our capabilities are, we know what their capabilities are, and we can work together to solve a problem."

"We thought it would be a great idea because obviously the city of Fairbury is supplied natural gas by Black Hills Energy, so to have the opportunity to bring trainers in from Black Hills to teach us the correct things to do, we thought it’d be a fantastic idea to get it here, and open it up to every department in our county and even within our mutual aid district," Fairbury rural fire chief Judd Stewart said.

From gas meters on the side of a building to the stark scenes of a burning car, these first responders received first hand experience fighting four different scenarios a natural gas fire might occur. Even though these types of blazes aren’t common, knowing how to face them could be crucial.

"Most of the structures in town are fed natural gas for heat or for cooking or for whatever, so even if the gas service isn’t directly involved, there’s still a gas service that we have to deal with on any structure fire," said Stewart. "The percentage of fires that we’ve had that actually involve natural gas equipment is very low, but we’ve got to train for those low frequency, high risk events, and that’s why we’re here tonight."

Typically, firefighters are tasked with eliminating a blaze as efficiently as possible. But in the event of a natural gas eruption, the objective becomes to minimize and contain the fire, not put it out completely – that will make it much easier to determine the fire’s root cause.

"We’re here to train them more on how to contain more than put out natural gas fires, because if they contain, we just allow it to burn, and we know where the gas is. If we put it out, we don’t know where the gas is and then we have to start looking, evacuating," said Thompson. "Natural gas incidents are pretty rare, but when they happen they do create a lot of media attention, people get a little scared. Natural gas is a safe utility, I’ve worked with it for 36 years with no incidents. [All of this serves to] prepare them for that one-off potential."

Of course, sometimes the fire just needs to be put out. So when water doesn’t work, firefighters can utilize a unique agent called Special H, which eliminates this particular strain of burn almost immediately.

"As we talk about mitigating scenes, we have three priorities," Stewart outlined. "Number one is life safety, that’s life safety of our firefighters and of the personnel. Second is scene stabilization, so whatever we’re dealing with, we want to stabilize the incident. And then third is property conservation. So we want to be able to learn what we have tonight, and bring that to any incident that we may have moving forward."

"It’s a way to partner with the community, and the first responders in the community," said Thompson. "We have a really good liaison with almost all of our community partners, especially our first responders, because we have to work well together and depend on each other – they do their job, we do our job, and we do it together. And it’s an appreciation of what they do – most people are running away from fire, these guys are running into ‘em. And you gotta respect that."

Black Hills runs training exercises like this in each of the six states they have natural gas facilities in. There are typically two training sessions in each state each year; Black Hills' other 2025 training session was held in Gretna.