If the weather cooperates, the Wrangell Volunteer Fire Department will burn down an empty house on Evergreen Avenue in a training exercise Saturday, Nov. 29.

A portion of Evergreen Avenue will be closed to traffic from approximately 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. for the all-day training session. The house at 414 Evergreen Ave. is about 1,000 feet north of the state ferry terminal.

Drivers are asked to use the Airport Loop Road to come and go from Evergreen on the other side of the fire.

“If it’s blowing real hard, we’ll have to postpone,” Fire Chief Jordan Buness said.

The department has not burned down a house for training since 2012, he said.

“By the end of the day, we’ll have burned the whole thing,” said Anna Allen, the department’s EMS administrator.

“We’re going to be doing a handful of different trainings,” practicing and learning interior and exterior firefighting skills, she said.

Firefighters already have stripped the single-story house of any hazardous materials, Allen said Nov. 21. “We did a whole lot of haul-out beforehand,” during the department’s weekly Wednesday evening training sessions this month.

That pre-burndown training included full building searches, navigating with thermal imaging cameras, finding and removing “victims,” incident command operations and other procedures.

Buness said the department has secured the required burn permit from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

“Frank W. Warfel has graciously provided this building for us to train in,” the department announced.

The property owner is responsible for cleaning up the site after the fire, Allen said.