About 50 students will make a rescue from a burning building, steady a fire hose shooting water at 150 pounds per square inch, and scale an engine ladder at the Illinois Fire Services Institute on Sunday for the Fire Factor Challenge.

The event, in conjunction with Campus Fire Safety Week, is to provide students with a firsthand experience of a room fire and sensitize them to various fire hazards.

“What you see in the movies is not what fires are like,” said Eddie Bain, program director at the Fire Services Institute.

The Champaign and Urbana fire departments as well as local branches of State Farm Insurance are co-sponsoring the event, which lasts from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Twenty local firefighters will help ensure students get as authentic an experience as possible, said Janet Maupin, Champaign Fire Department’s deputy fire marshall.

“Each team of students will be matched with a firefighter to accompany them through all the day’s activities,” Maupin said.

Donning a firefighter jacket, a helmet, boots and an air pack, each participant will enter a burning building.

Bain said during the first Fire Factor Challenge, students were shocked to learn how fast fire could spread. To demonstrate, instructors set up two mock dorm rooms side by side with a sprinkler system only in one.

“The one without sprinklers was completely ablaze after two minutes,” Bain said.

Alice Kinkelaar of Urbana Fire Rescue Services said the event’s organizers targeted people in a position to spread the fire safety message, including resident advisors and Greek community representatives.

One message Bain hoped the students take to their neighbors is how consequential even a small fire can be.

“Typically, everything a college student has – their homework, books, computer and clothes – are all in one room,” Bain said. “That means even just a minor blaze could mean that student loses a whole semester.”