The Raleigh center was open to the public Wednesday, and people were free to walk around and watch while trainees chiseled, chipped and crawled through barriers, creating a squall of cement dust amid churning generators and rubble.

The goal is to create a 162-person team from Wake, Durham and Orange counties that can be deployed at a moment's notice anywhere in the state or even beyond, said Training Chief Freddy Lynn. Two more courses are scheduled for this year.

A final exam today will involve extricating "victims" -- dummies -- from a Capital Area Transit bus half buried in rubble to simulate what looks like a bridge collapse.

"Everything they've seen out here, they'll see there," said Raleigh Fire Lt. Mike Davidson, one of about a dozen yellow-shirted instructors monitoring each team's advance.

"We've got six groups out here," he said. "There'll be five, six means of entry into this rubble pile. They'll make it like a real situation."

The current class is the first at the school, which was funded in part by $220,000 from the city of Raleigh and a $100,000 grant from the Governor's Office, said Raleigh Fire Chief Earl Fowler.

The team's major equipment include two tractor-trailers custom-designed to travel 75 mph on the highway, as well as to get around off-road and to maneuver in tight situations. Each pulls a trailer loaded with lumber, aluminum pole jacks, compressors, generators and powerful hand-held saws and jackhammers. Loaded with gear accumulated over the years, the trucks will be worth about $900,000, Lynn said.

The team is trained according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency's guidelines for responding to an incident such as the Oklahoma City bombing or the attacks on the World Trade Center. It would also respond to an incident such as the massive tornado in 1988 that killed four in Raleigh and left a 10-mile path of destruction in Wake County, including a North Raleigh Kmart and numerous homes.

"This training would have been beneficial then," Lynn said. "We would have known more about being able to observe the structure itself, where we could go and what we could do. ... That training was really not available at that time."

The course involves about four days of classroom instruction. Engineers teach firefighters how to assess a collapsed structure, how to estimate its weight and how much lumber is needed to shore it up. Raleigh has retained an engineering firm, Atlas Engineering of Raleigh, to travel with the team and provide expertise at the scene of a disaster.

Trainees also practiced moving heavy objects with ropes and pulleys strung from timber frames, and cutting holes into various types of materials.

On Wednesday, firefighters put the lessons into action. Their "playground," as one instructor called it, was a series of 150-foot tunnels formed by stacking pre-formed concrete "double tees." The narrow passages were blocked with obstacles such as steel-reinforced concrete slabs, refrigerators and even cars.

The entrance to one, nicknamed "Fun House," was blocked with a concrete pipe that took firefighters nearly two hours to cut through before they could proceed. Later they were blocked by a steel plate in front of a refrigerator door that would catch fire and force an evacuation. And before seeing the light at the end of the dark, 300-foot tunnel, there was a crushed car to cut through.

Durham firefighter Tony Crabtree, covered in dust and mud and taking a break, described the conditions as dreary. "It's very tight, especially with two people working," Crabtree said. "Dusty. Can't see because your goggles are fogging up real bad. It's uncomfortable laying on [broken] concrete, and the weight of the tools, it's pretty exhausting