Cool!
Forcing trainees to fight a controlled fire they can't easily put out is good training and not easy to replicate. We tried it at the old USF fire school and a backdraft blew a hole through the cinderblock smokehouse.

Cap2k7, I was being more flippant than sarcastic. I just hate using emoticons. I appreciate your making sure  of my motive, and it's good to see someone putting more material in the forum! I tend to be a little flippant (or very pedantic); if it gets inappropriate to the tone of the forum, let me know and I'll tone it down.
 
Teaching CERTS to use hose is great, not only as a "use the hose" lesson, but as a teamwork lesson. (Also, a lesson not to point the hose at your feet and open a straight stream...). Yes, our local (Central California) TV news was full of pictures from San Francisco in '89  full of people in civilian clothes assisting or trying to assist firefighters move and protect charged deuce and a half lines in the Mission district, better we were (re)trained than totally green.
 
 I didn't mean "force" as in "coerce" but as in "making it inevitable". And certainly not in the first go-round, that would give them a defeatist attitude.  
 
The backdraft was actually comical for the students since we were not in danger. We were outside the smokehouse, a couple of smokey fires made with wooden pallets had occurred; to make them re-kindle despite our watering them down, the instructors put JP4 on them. A couple minutes later we were lined up outside and a group ready to go in, the lead instructor tossed in a mop handle torch..there was a "BANG" and a new round three foot wondow appeard when a chunk of cinderblock just fell out onto the ground. They got a new smokehouse, after three months.
 
This site can be a national forum, we all need to try to pump it up more.