The clouds of dark smoke coming from the Casper Natrona County International Airport today (Friday) were because they're training airport firefighters. Airport Manager Glen Januska says the Casper airport is a regional training facility for airport fire departments, and in order to serve commercial aircraft an airport needs its own fire department. The training today included airport firefighters from Grand Island, Nebraska.

Airport firefighting is specialized:

"Our airport public safety department and firefighters, to stay certified, have to do a live burn every year. And that's not true just for our firefighters but for any airport fire department that has commercial service. So we have the regional training facility that we not only do the training with our personnel, but also make that available for fire departments in airports all around the country and we've had departments come in from all over. In fact, the burns that we're doing today, we have 30 firefighters in for doing burns from Grand Island, Nebraska."

Mr. Januska said they'll probably be done by the afternoon.

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