OSU FST receives grant for new mobile fire lab for Advanced Fire Behavior course

OSU FST receives grant for new mobile fire lab for Advanced Fire Behavior course

Friday, December 5, 2025

Media Contact: Tanner Holubar | Communications Specialist | 405-744-2065 | [email protected]

Oklahoma State University's College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology Fire Service Training program is a leader in utilizing research, professional experience and training to ensure firefighters are equipped to save lives and property.  

FST's Advanced Fire Behavior course, which has been taught for 15 years, will soon be enhanced thanks to an Assistance to Firefighters Grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency of more than $196,000 to purchase a new mobile fire lab.

The mobile fire lab is used by FST to bring training around the state, increasing the professional preparedness of firefighters across Oklahoma. But the program's current lab is no longer mobile after 15 years of use in more than 150 sessions, with students required to travel to Stillwater to take part.

The lab features multiple thermocouples that feed data to a computer, each placed at a different part of the lab that measures temperatures at different points. When a flashover happens, the top of the box can get around 600 degrees, with temperatures lower in the box reaching around 225 degrees.

In the course, students spend four hours of classroom instruction learning why and how fire behaves the way it does. They study why different burned materials produce variations in types of smoke explosions, backdrafts and flashovers.

This classroom instruction is combined with real-world training, with students in full firefighter gear setting up inside the enclosed fire lab to experience temperatures of up to 225 degrees.

"Everything is so they understand the differences between anything they may run into while fighting a fire," FST Program Manager Paddy Metcalf said. "We study what could possibly happen as well as the precursors that lead to those happening."

Using handheld thermal imaging cameras to point out hotspots combined with the data fed to the computers by the thermocouples, graphs are created that show where various temperatures were recorded as well as the point when the flashover hits.  

Instructors then put these graphs on a screen in front of the students in the classroom, discussing in further detail the training they just experienced.  

"These graphs show them how the fire builds up and where it plateaus right before the flash hits," Metcalf said.

This course is just one example of FST answering the Cowboy Code, harnessing gritty innovation to enhance the training of firefighters, thereby saving lives. For more information on the OSU FST program, click here.