By Charlene Bielema
Daily Gazette
The Sterling and Rock Falls fire departments’ shared plan to build a regional fire training tower is moving closer to reality with the receipt of $825,000 in federal funding secured by U.S. Rep. Eric Sorensen, D- Rockford.
Sorensen presented Rock Falls Fire Chief Kyle Sommers with a ceremonial big check during a Feb. 13 visit. Sommers and Sterling Fire Chief David Northcutt, during a recent interview on Shaw Local Radio, discussed what the funding means for the project and the facility’s importance for area firefighters and public safety.
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“This isn’t something that’s been rushed into,” Northcutt said. “Everything is being planned out.”
Both Sommers and Northcutt said the departments had been working together for four years to create plans for and fund the tower, to enhance firefighting and technical rescue training and provide firefighters with more training opportunities.
Plans call for the facility to be built in Rock Falls’ industrial park.
“This gives us that ability to do training every single day, anytime that we want,” Sommers said.
Sommers said that training would include practicing in the same conditions firefighters would encounter at a real-life fire scene.
Sorensen requested and secured funds through the federal Community Project Funding process in 2024, only to see those funds rolled back in early 2025. Sorensen announced in November that the funds had been reinstated through the fiscal 2026 Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration and Related Agencies Appropriations Act that was approved as part of the government funding package to reopen the government last fall.
“Our firefighters do amazing work to keep us safe, but in order to have the confidence necessary to battle dangerous fires, they need access to hands-on training that can prepare them to enter and navigate burning buildings,” Sorensen said when making that announcement. “The new Rock Falls fire training tower will better prepare firefighters across the Rockford region for the extreme environments they must work in, ensuring they are well-prepared to keep themselves and our communities safe when duty calls.”
Sommers also said the training tower will benefit the whole region. Usually firefighters have to travel for something like this, Sommers said, explaining traveling to Champaign or Rockford means time spent traveling back and forth, wear and tear on vehicles, and expenses that include classes, lodging and meals. There also is a limit to how many can go to training at once.
Having a local facility means that firefighters, while training, would still be accessible to the community if needed for a call, Northcutt said.
The chiefs said the next step in the process is to complete paperwork that comes with receiving federal funds. Once that is done, the departments can look toward the construction process. They are hoping to start construction this year; it will take about a year to build, they said.
In the future, Sommers and Northcutt also would like to have classroom facilities available to host training sessions.
“We’d like to have a one-stop training facility where you could host any type of training you want,” Sommers said, adding that those plans would hinge on staffing and how the use of the tower grows.
They’d also like to have Sauk Valley Community College bring back its fire science associate degree program, Northcutt said.
“If everything falls into place, that’s one of the things that we’d like to see come out of this as well,” Northcutt said.
Early public discussions about the need for the facility surfaced in October 2023 as members of the Rock Falls and Sterling fire departments asked the cities to form an intergovernmental agreement as one of several steps needed to build a shared firefighting training facility.
A needs assessment for the two fire departments found that they “lacked some facilities to conduct realistic scenario-based training and solutions at our local level,” Sommers said during the Oct. 17, 2023, Rock Falls City Council meeting.
The assessment was done in the wake of the death of Sterling Fire Lt. Garrett Ramos, who died Dec. 4, 2021, after falling through the floor of a burning home in rural Rock Falls.
Ramos, 38, was discovered unresponsive in a basement that, at the time, fire command didn’t know existed, about 30 minutes after two of his mayday calls went unanswered.
Neither Sterling nor Rock Falls had an easily accessible facility in which to conduct realistic scenarios. Such training was an immediate need identified by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the National Fire Protection Association guidelines.
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