Introducing Fireground Theater, a free size-up and command training tool from TrainTeachLead.
Every instructor who has ever run a tabletop knows the moment. You put a flat photo of a building on the screen, look at your classroom, and say:
“You arrive on scene. You’ve got moderate smoke showing from a second-floor window on the Alpha side. What do you have, and what are you going to do?”
And right there, without meaning to, you’ve done the hardest part of the job for them.
Reading conditions is the skill. Recognizing the origin of the smoke and its volume, what the color is telling you, or that nothing is showing from the street but rapidly escalating on the Charlie side is what separates an officer who sizes up from an officer who recites a script. When we narrate the conditions, the student never gets to practice pulling them from the scene.
Fireground Theater is a small attempt to fix that. It puts a scene in front of the student with the conditions actually showing, impacted by wind with variables for type and volume of smoke and fire, and it keeps the instructor in charge of what happens next.
Now we’re analyzing instead of imaging.
What it is
Fireground Theater is a browser-based tool. Nothing to install, nothing to buy, no account. You open it on a laptop, tablet, or phone, and it works the same on all three.
The idea is simple. You stage a scene: a building or incident with smoke, fire, or vapor for a hazmat incident placed where you want. The student looks at it and gives their size-up and assignments. Then you decide whether their actions made things better or worse, and the screen changes to show the result. The student reacts to the new picture. You decide again. That’s the whole loop.
It doesn’t grade tactics, and it isn’t supposed to. There’s no algorithm deciding whether a transitional attack was the right call. The decision belongs to the person in the room who knows the department, the crew, and the standard that’s being taught or tested.
The scenes
There are twelve built-in scenes, and I built them to cover ground that most simulators skip.
The municipal set is what you’d expect: a two-story residence, a strip mall, an office building, a vehicle accident, a semi rollover. Useful for company officer development, promotional prep, and probationary firefighters who need reps on the basics.
The industrial set is where it gets interesting for those responding to high-hazard facilities: a manufacturing building, a process unit with columns and platforms, a tank farm, a chip silo with a dust collector on top, a cryogenic tanker offloading at a bulk tank, a container yard with a drum spill, and a rail car. If you run an industrial emergency response team, you know how thin the training material is for these targets. Now there’s something to put in front of your people.
Every scene is drawn from all four sides. That’s not a cosmetic feature. It means when a firefighter says “I’m going to do a 360,” you can actually walk them around the building, and it means you can hide a condition on the Charlie side that they’ll only find if they ask.
Your own buildings
The built-in scenes are generic graphics. They’re good for teaching, but the thing your crews actually respond to is the warehouse on Route 9 or the tank battery behind the rail spur.
You can load your own photos. Walk a target hazard, shoot it from four sides with your phone, and load one photo per side. The same effects, the same 360, the same Better/Worse branches, now on a building your people already recognize.
The effects
Six effects, each of which behaves the way it should:
- Light smoke and dark smoke, which rise and drift with whatever wind you set.
- Flame, with glow and embers.
- Pool fire, which spreads horizontally across a surface and makes its own smoke.
- Relief flare, a directional jet you can aim: straight up off a PRV, sideways off a sheared flange, wherever the scenario calls for it.
- Vapor cloud, which does the opposite of smoke: hugs the ground and moves downwind. Set the wind and the cloud tells your students where not to stand.
You place each one by tapping the picture, then adjust its size, how heavy it is, and which way it’s pushing. There’s no visible marker once the scenario is running, so the student has to look for the cue rather than have a circle point to it.
Better and Worse
This is the part I think matters most.
Each scenario is a tree, not a slideshow. Each step has a “Better” branch and a “Worse” branch, and you build both. Fire showing on arrival might branch to knockdown with steam conversion if the student gets water on it fast, or to attic involvement if they don’t. Two firefighters can run the exact same scenario on the same afternoon and end up in completely different places, because their decisions were different.
You build the branches by hand if you want a scenario tailored to your department. Or you tap Fire, Hazmat, or Surprise Me and the tool generates a complete scenario for whatever scene you have open.
Putting it on the big screen
Run it from your laptop and tap Open display window. A clean, full-screen view of the scene opens in a second window — no buttons, no labels, just the conditions. Drag that to your projector or classroom TV. Everything you do on your laptop shows up there instantly, and the candidate never sees your controls.
That’s the setup for a promotional assessment center, an academy classroom, or a drill night at the station.
Sharing scenarios
Scenarios save in your browser, and any of them can be exported as a file. Email it to another instructor, drop it in a shared drive, or bring it to a training day. They import it and it’s ready to run.
A few honest notes
The drawn scenes are training diagrams, not photographs. They’re meant to be read, not to fool anyone. If you want photo-real, use your own photos.
The vapor cloud is visible on screen because it has to be but don’t forget that just as many hazards can be completely invisible. When you run a hazmat scenario, consider pairing it with the Gas Monitor Simulator so the student is reading a meter, not just a picture.
And it’s a size-up tool, not a tactics grader. Its only opinion is the one you give it when you tap Better or Worse.
Try it
Fireground Theater is free and lives at trainteachlead.com/fireground-theater-simulator. Open it, pick a scene, tap Fire, and run it for the next person who walks into the training room.
Then tell me what broke, what confused you, and what scene you wish existed. That’s how the next version gets built.