Why North Carolina Needed Its Own Swift Water Rescue Training Facility
WRAL reported on the swift water training gap Fayetteville Tech set out to close: rescuers practicing in a contaminated river, and a state leaning on out-of-state teams when floods hit.
WRAL's Gilbert Baez reports from the construction site of FTCC's Regional Fire and Rescue Training Center, November 2021. Image: WRAL News.
When Hurricane Matthew flooded Cumberland and Robeson counties in October 2016, North Carolina didn't have enough swift water rescuers of its own. Teams from as far away as New York came to Fayetteville to pull stranded residents out of the water.
Five years later, WRAL's Gilbert Baez reported on the project meant to change that: an indoor swift water training tank at Fayetteville Technical Community College's new regional fire and rescue training center, modeled on Fathom's indoor facility in Texas.
Training in the Cape Fear River
Before the facility, local rescuers often practiced in the Cape Fear River. It's real moving water, but it's unpredictable, full of debris and contaminated, so every training day carried real risk. Conditions also depended on the weather and river levels, not on what the team needed to practice.
A First for the Southeast
WRAL reported that the $3.5 million facility would be the only one of its kind in FEMA Region 4, which covers eight southeastern states. Instructors would be able to run a wide range of rescue scenarios, by day or at night, in a controlled tank instead of a flooded river.
Construction was already underway on the larger training complex at the time of the report. The swift water facility opened in November 2023 with a 140,000-gallon Fathom tank, larger than the original plan, and has since trained responders from across the Southeast and beyond.