How San Diego Fire-Rescue Built a Department-Wide VR Training Program
350+ firefighters through the program in 21 days. Built by a one-person training office. Here's the short version.
San Diego Fire-Rescue is one of the largest metro fire departments in the United States. In 2024, Captain J Harris partnered with XpertVR to build a structured, department-wide VR training program from the ground up.
The goal was straightforward: add high-quality search-and-rescue reps without adding live burns.
The numbers from the first rollout
- 350+ firefighters trained during a 21-day large-scale event in fall 2025
- Weekly station-by-station use, ongoing, as the hardware and software rotate between fire stations across the department
- Demand outpaced capacity by the end of week one of the formal event. The team had to compress the schedule and turn crews away
- Battalion-level requests for ongoing sessions, with a second large-scale event planned for fall 2026
- Veterans became the loudest internal endorsers of the program, which wasn’t what Captain Harris expected from the most traditionally skeptical group in any fire service
What sits underneath the numbers
The program is anchored to peer-reviewed industry research (UL FSRI fire dynamics and the Firefighter Rescue Survey’s “First 3000 Rescues” dataset). It’s built around role-based benchmarks for every riding position, and mirrored against San Diego’s own SOPs and procedures.
Captain Harris was clear from day one that VR is “and,” not “or.” It’s a complement to live-burn training, used alongside the traditional methods rather than in place of them.
What it does well: real reps on decision-making, crew communication, search patterns, and door control in a no-fault learning environment. Without the cost, the travel time, or the turnout-gear exposure of another live evolution.
What you don't see in the highlights
A few things worth knowing that don’t show up in a stat:
- Crews started getting reps from day one. The kit went into weekly station rotation right away, while Captain Harris’s team spent the next year developing the structured scenarios and benchmarks that anchored the large-scale formal events. Two tracks, running in parallel
- The skill gap between veterans and newer firefighters was negligible once everyone had warmed up. That alone changes the conversation about who VR is “for”
- Captain Harris scaled this with a training-office staff of one plus an admin aid. No new hires required
Get the full case study
The short version above is the tip of it. The full case study walks through:
- Captain Harris’s exact build process, start to scale
- The 3 specific scenarios San Diego runs and why they use the same building for all 3
- The role-based benchmarks per riding position
- The “no-fault learning environment” approach that broke down internal skepticism
- The 5 specific steps any training officer can lift and apply to their own department
- The honest stuff: what didn’t work, what they’re holding off on, and what’s on the roadmap for fall 2026