Fayetteville Technical Community College will hold a groundbreaking at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 1, to celebrate the start of construction on the final phase of its $45 million Dr. J. Larry Keen Regional Fire and Emergency Training Complex.
Local and state dignitaries are expected to participate. The Burn Campus is located at 4705 Corporation Drive in Fayetteville, off Tom Starling Road. The main address of the training complex is 775 Tom Starling Road in Fayetteville.
The project will complete the Burn Village campus portion of the 30-acre complex, which also includes a Technical Rescue Training campus and the only indoor swift water rescue training facility on the East Coast. The complex is the largest training facility of its kind in the region, providing a wide variety of specialized training experiences, and is a local and regional hub for fire and rescue personnel.
At the Burn Village, in addition to an existing 4-story live-burn training tower built in the first phase of development of the complex, these training areas will be added:
- A 2-story live-burn apartment-style tower
- A 1-story residential live-burn building
- An aircraft live burn simulator
- A 1,500-square-foot burn pit
- A concrete pad for staging various training scenarios
- A fire flashover training area
An urban search and rescue training area is also being added behind the Swift Water Rescue Training facility.
The project is expected to be completed in August 2025. Barnhill Contracting Co. is the project construction manager. HH Architecture is the architect.
The Technical Rescue Training campus opened in September 2022. It includes the FTCC-Cumberland County Regional Fire & Rescue Training Center, a 26,000-square-foot building with classrooms, offices, meeting space, training simulators and an apparatus bay for three vehicles. The campus also includes a 4-story “cold” training tower; an area for confined space and trench rescue training; a grain bin/farm rescue training area; and a simulated communications tower.
The Swift Water Rescue Training Facility, completed in October 2023, contains a 140,000-gallon indoor tank equipped with 10 pumps that can create a flow of up to 7 knots. The facility allows first responders and others to train year-round in a variety of simulated conditions for rescues in floods, swift-water situations and other water-rescue situations.
The 30-acre site was donated to FTCC by Cumberland County for the purpose of the complex. Funding for the project has come from state and county funding provided to FTCC. Its success is due to the hard work and partnership of many, including the Cumberland County Board of Commissioners, the county’s past and present legislative delegation, the Cumberland County Fire Chiefs Association, FTCC’s Board of Trustees, and the N.C. Community College System.
