10 Minute-Training: Odor of Gas at a Rural Church—It Was a Routine Call, Until It Wasn’t
10-Minute Training
Odor of Gas at a Rural Church—It Was a Routine Call, Until It Wasn’t
By Ed Hartin
B Shifter Buckslip, March 10, 2026
Every month, the B Shifter Buckslip features a 10-Minute Training scenario designed to provide a bit of synthetic experience while enhancing your ability to recognize patterns, identify relevant cues, expectancies and anomalies, set plausible goals, and develop a workable incident action plan.
Routine calls can breed complacency, but even the most common incidents demand vigilance from the first-arriving IC.
Odor of gas calls are often considered routine, and many are—until they suddenly are not. News reports remind us that natural gas or propane leaks inside buildings or underground with migration into structures can lead to explosions, posing significant risks to occupants and firefighters. Since January 1 of this year, there have been at least nine structural explosions in the United States involving propane or natural gas.
This month’s 10-Minute Training focuses on a propane explosion inside a church in Boonville, N.Y., which injured both occupants and firefighters. Please keep the injured members of the Boonville Fire Department in your thoughts, and honor them by learning from this incident. Our additional learning this month deals with recognizing hazards from propane and natural gas leaks indoors, along with important lessons from previous related incidents.
Click the image below to download the drill.
For other Ten-Minute Trainings, visit commandcompetence.com
If you are a Blue Card IC, check out the Hazmat IC Module on natural gas and complete your hazmat IC certification.
Ed Hartin, MS, EFO, FIFireE, CFO, retired as fire chief with East County Fire and Rescue in Camas, Wash., after a 50-year fire service career. Ed maintains an active international training and consulting practice and is a Blue Card instructor. He holds the Chief Fire Officer designation from the Commission on Professional Credentialing and is a Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers. Ed has undergraduate degrees in fire protection technology and fire service administration and a master’s degree in education. Since 2017, Ed has developed more than 450 10-Minute Trainings to provide ICs with deliberate practice to build competence.