THE BRADDOCK HEIGHTS (MARYLAND) VOLUNTEER FIRE COMPANY is taking their public information responsibility seriously.

After seeing an advertisement for the BullEx Intelligent Training System for fire extinguisher classes, the Company voted to purchase one of the $9,000 systems.  They raised the funds by holding gun raffles, door-to-door solicitations, and their annual food booth at the county fair.

The BullEx system utilizes a computer-controlled propane burner that is “attacked” with a special extinguisher that has the look and feel of a regular ABC dry powder extinguisher.  The training extinguisher sprays a compressed air and water mixture on the training fire and if it’s applied properly the fire goes out.

The system easily fits into the bed of the FD’s pickup truck and they plan to take it to many organizations to train their public on proper fire extinguisher use.

Firegeezer says:  Good for them!!  What a great way to work to make your community safer.

The full story is carried by the Frederick News Post HERE.
BullEx Digital Safety website is HERE.
Frederick County Volunteer Fire and Rescue Assoc. WEBSITE.

Firegeezer reviewed the BullEx “dry” digital trainer last September HERE.

THE VOLUNTEER FIREFIGHTER IN QUEBEC WHO PERISHED AT A HOUSE FIRE on Sunday afternoon had not yet completed his minumum training. (Firegeezer report HERE.)

Andres Manseau had been a member of the Val-des-Monts Fire Department for only six months.

CBC News is REPORTING:

We have a councillor there who works for us, and, from what I hear, that guy had no formation [training] at all,” said Gilles Raymond, president of Syndicat des pompiers et pompières du Québec, the union that represents firefighters.

Val-des-Monts fire Chief Benoit Gagnon said Manseau had started his training, but hadn’t finished it.

Police said they are trying to determine exactly how Manseau got trapped inside the fire and whether he was properly supervised. But, they said, it’s too early to say if more experience or more training would have saved his life.

Provincial law requires firefighters to complete 275 hours of basic training.

 FossilMedic tells us what happened:

VIRTUAL TRAINING:
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN ‘ABBOTTVILLE’ WENT DIGITAL

In the mid 1980’s Warren Township Division Fire Chief Don Abbott helped develop the Marion County HazMat Task Force. Like other early glow-worms, much of the training was developed in-house. Chief Abbott developed a HO-scale model city capable of handling 139 different training sequences. The 12’ by 18’ diorama had complete radio and telephone capabilities, using 234 buildings and 160 vehicles. Chief Abbot needed a trailer to move the model disaster city.

Retiring in 1994, Don and his wife Bev made a living by providing haz-mat, disaster and incident management training on “Abbottville” through his Command Emergency Response Training company. The Abbottville incident management classes quickly filled up at the national and regional fire shows. As the specter of Y2K rose, Don and Bev put on multi-day 24 hour scenarios for local, state and federal agencies.

Speaking with Chief Abbott in 1999 at the Firehouse Expo, he shared his observation about the challenge of developing depth for a campaign operation. Few organizations had strong players two and three levels deep into their organization. This same issue was mentioned by Prince William County in preparing for a pandemic [ http://firegeezer.com/2007/11/13/pandemic-staffing/ ]. Don sold Abbotville to Command School TTX [ http://www.commandschool.com/aboutus.html ].

In 2002, Don accepted an opportunity to develop a more sophisticated training program in the quarters of a surplus Phoenix fire station. Hired by PFD as a project manager, Don and Bev moved into old Fire Station 30 and built the Command Training Center [ http://phoenix.gov/FIRE/ctc.html ]

I attended four hour demonstrations at the CTC in 2004 and 2007. What was impressive was the ability to deliver a dynamic incident in real-time to 10 sectors (kiosks with computers), the incident officer in a suburban and the command team in a mock-up of PFD Command Van 1. The ability to practice a standardized response to an incident by all of the players, regardless of jurisdiction, was great.

My biggest take-away from the sessions was the ability of the department to try out different command procedures in a realistic environment. Some procedures that made sense on the whiteboard were difficult to execute in a simulation. Ergonomics and task roles issues with the battalion chief’s suburban and the command van were also identified.

Abbott received the Fire Engineering Training Achievement Award in April 2006. The award announcement noted that “To date, the Command Training Center has trained more than 3,000 people. Don has also helped develop three-, five-, and six-day training packages for outside agencies and has delivered command training to members of more than 100 departments across the country. The Phoenix Center has become a national model not only for the facility itself but also for the curriculum and the training materials produced there. Each year, the facility has visitors from around the globe, and Don’s work has led to the creation of similar facilities across the nation.”

Don, working with the folks at Digital Combustion [ http://www.digitalcombustion.com/ ], has worked to deliver as much of the CTC experience as can be reduced into a single laptop. He has also shared the Phoenix experiences to help develop the next generation of virtual reality incident simulators. There are eleven large incident simulators built upon the Phoenix experience. The only public one east of the Mississippi is at the Montgomery County, Maryland, Public Safety Training Academy (PSTA).

The PSTA Command Development Center was opened April 2007. Using the latest in digital technology and presentation, it may have the largest fire and rescue tactical tabletop venue in the nation. Fellow geezer Tom Schwartz provided the NIMS city to Montgomery[ http://www.ics-toolbox.com/ ]. You may recall that the Charleston incident management training was delivered at the PSTA.

By 2018 we should have the ability to practice any incident management challenge in a safe and realistic simulation trainer. And flying cars …. And robot firefighters …

THE PROVINCE OF NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA, HAS 7,550 FIREFIGHTERS in nearly 290 fire departments.  But almost all of them are operating without any set training standards and with no training facilities to learn proper skills and techniques of firefighting.

Currently there is only one Fire Academy in the entire province and the facilities are more than 40 years old.

Nova Scotia Firefighters School photo

The Nova Scotia Chronicle Herald received a copy of a report from the Fire Chief’s Training Committee that points out the severe shortage of proper training for the province.

The report calls for replacing the central training facility with a modern and more adequate facility and for the establishment of five regional training sites around the province.  They are also calling for the creation of a set of professional firefighting standards along with mandatory training regulations.

The Chronicle Herald reports further:

Chief Bernie MacKinnon of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality said that right now firefighters usually get their first training answering real 911 calls, putting themselves and the public at risk.

“Career and volunteer firefighters in Nova Scotia cannot, and should not, rely on on-the-job live fire training to acquire basic firefighting and fire command skills,” said Chief MacKinnon, the committee chairman.

Read the complete story in the Chronicle Herald HERE.

LEE COUNTY, FLORIDA, INSTALLED THE STATE’S FIRST driving simulator designed specifically for ambulance training back in October.  Now the county have given the go-ahead to order a second and place it in service.

The simulators are manufactured by the Doron Precision Systems of Binghamton, New York, and cost about $160,000.

The DPS police car simulator

The Naples News reports:

Installed at Edison College’s Fort Myers campus, the simulator serves college classes as well as emergency services new hires and veterans for driving certification.

Edison College is authorized by the state to train emergency providers, including emergency medical technicians and paramedics for Southwest Florida. About 150 paramedics and 250 EMTs train at Edison annually.

The simulator ambulance comes equipped like a typical 14-foot-long, 8-foot-wide, 15,000-pound ambulance, complete with flashing lights, siren, air-brake sound effects and a two-seat cockpit.

The seats look out on two, 65-inch, high-resolution monitors as front windows. The side windows, complete with adjustable mirrors, have two, 42-inch plasma monitors, which show a rear-view on split-screen.

The simulator also has about 150 road scenarios that it can run through. A driver and his instructor can start with a simple program of weaving through cones and progress to heavy traffic with street signals, pedestrians crossing the road, and treacherous weather with torrential rain.

If you “skid” on the wet road and hit the curb, it will be felt in the cab of the simulator.  The rest of the class can sit behind the trainee and observe his driving.

Read the full Naples Daily News story HERE.

The Doron Precision Systems makes driving simulators for trucks, buses and, yes, fire engines.

The Doron Precision Systems website is HERE.

Our posting the other day (HERE) on the empressment of the concrete pumper as an additional aerial stream generated a lot of interest as well as compliments for its innovativeness.

Jeff Harkey, publisher of FireNews.net that carried the story received several requests for more information.  He got an email from one of the local chiefs in the county and sent it on to us and we’d like to share it with you:

This truck is operated by a Wallace fireman and they have adapted it to be used as an aerial device if needed. We used it in Warsaw at a commercial structure fire downtown in 1997, at Carrolls Mill twice in the past few years and has been available if needed. It is set to recieve several 3″ lines or 5″ and has a discharge on the end if you need to hook a smaller wye on it. The time I remember using it was on Carrolls Mill, we had a 2.5″ x 2.5″x2.5″ wye hooked to it. It is very useful being there is no aerial device in Duplin County. Recently 2 departments around in border counties have obtained such aerial devices.

Sincerely
Lee Kennedy
Assistant Chief
Faison Fire & Rescue

Jeff tells us that he will be trying to get some more photos of the rig and its adapters.  We’ll keep you in touch.

AN EXTENSIVE TESTING OF VENTILATION PRACTICES IN HIGH-RISE BUILDINGS is being conducted this week in New York City.

All photos courtesy New York Times / Nicole Bengiveno

With observers from several major cities that have large numbers of extremely tall high-rise buildings, the FDNY is performing a series of test fires and recording the conditions and results from various postive-pressure methods of ventilation.

The test building is a seven-story structure on Governor’s Island that has been unused since the U. S. Coast Guard vacated the island.  The entire island and all of its buildings were ceded from the Federal government over to NYC a few years ago and this building has been provided for the testing.

The tests, which began Saturday, are being paid for with a $1 million federal grant to Polytechnic University of Brooklyn, which will create computer models and study the data compiled in the week of fire demonstrations.  By Friday the building will be pretty well burned out and this phase of the testing will be complete.

The rooms were wired with sensors that recorded the slightest changes in conditions as the fire burned. Six floors below, technicians with laptop computers recorded temperature and pressure changes when the heat punctured windows.

Over the years, FDNY has noticed that one of their biggest enemies in the high-rise fires has been the onrush of air through broken windows, usually accellerated by winds that are present at the higher levels.  This windforce has driven the fire back over the FF’s working inside and has been a direct cause of several fire deaths to both FF’s and residents.

During yesterday’s testing a single 27-inch gasoline-powered fan placed at the base of a seven-story stairwell kept the stairwell free of smoke and at temperatures of about 50 degrees, even when its door was opened to a seventh-floor corridor that was heated by fire to 1,700 degrees.

Today’s New York Times has good coverage of the testing project HERE.

Steve Kerber, with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, watched the monitors and helped direct the various experiments. 

MASS-CASUALTY DRILLS USUALLY ARE FOCUSED around an outdoor event, such as a transportation incident, because there is room to stage lots of victims and space for observers.

But in Wales this week, three departments used their imagination and came up with a good, practical scenario that could be used by others.

The South Wales Echo describes it:

FILM-GOERS were relaxing in their seats at the Theatre Royal in Barry when the cinema was plunged into darkness.

There were shouts of panic as a fire at the side of the big screen began to grow in intensity. The room quickly filled with acrid smoke, causing the audience to choke and their eyes to run.

But thankfully, the fire was not real. The emergency had been staged as a training exercise by firefighters from Barry, Penarth and Ely.

Chris Legg, crew manager with Green Watch said such exercises helped to prepare his firefighters for some of the worst incidents they would have to deal with.

“We hope something like this never happens for real, but it is vital that we are trained to cope if it did,” he said.

The operation, which included casualties being treated on site for burns and smoke inhalation, involved 22 firefighters.

Firegeezer prefers practical evolutions like this one.  It would be good to see more imagination and variety in multi-company drills like this.

Whenever it’s possible, it is also good to include the local hospital in these drills and to transport the “victims” to the emergency room.  The hospital staff gets the benefit of all these triage makeup patients to work on, too.  And you get the benefit of an evaluation of your field work by a medical professional.

Barry Fire Station

South Wales Fire & Rescue Service WEBSITE.

THE CHUBB INSURANCE CO.’s Loss Control University is now open for public attendance.

Thomas W. LaCorte, Asst. Vice President, writes to us from his office in Warren, New Jersey:

The training center is operated by Chubb Insurance Company, a large property insurance carrier in the USA. We recently opened our facility to the general public and offer seven 1 and 2 day seminars on various fire protection topics from sprinkler systems to fire pumps. Our training is “hands-on” with a mix of classroom and live demos from fire pump tests to setting dry pipe valves. In 2007 we had over 800 firefighters, fire inspectors, sprinkler contractors, and building owners attend our seminars. We have been training NJ Fire Marshals since 1988 at our facility.

Our equipment is operational and includes, a diesel and electric fire pump, 3 dry pipe valves, single, double and on/off preaction valves as well a deluge valve. We also have an area where we can demonstrate the various valves with a live fire. It is one of the few working fire protection training facilities in the USA.

You can read more about the training facility at their website HERE and can request a schedule of their upcoming classes.  Warren, New Jersey, is about a 30-minute drive from the Newark airport.

IN LAST THURSDAY’S MORNING LINEUP (HERE) we reported on the IAFF’s press release promoting the new technology available to measure carbon monoxide (CO) levels in the field.  The Union is promoting the pulse oximeter made by the Masimo Corp.

Later that day we got an email from the lads at Fairfax County HazMat 440 telling us that they have had one in service already since last month.  Since the IAFF presser didn’t adequately describe the oximeter and how it works, I asked if one of them would write an article informing us on what the device does, etc.  M/Tech Keppley gladly filled the request and we are presenting it for you today.

The Rad-57 CO-Oximeter
by M/Tech Greg Keppley, HazMat 440
Fairfax County (Va.) Fire & Rescue Dept.

In 2005, Masimo Corporation (Irvine, CA) developed a new multi-wavelength Pulse CO-Oximetry technology called Rainbow SET, that continuously and non-invasively measures the percentage of hemoglobin saturated with oxygen (SpO2), as well as the percentage of methemoglobin (SpMet), the percentage of carboxyhemoglobin (SpCO), Pulse Rate and Perfusion Index (PI), all through a single sensor typically placed on the finger.” 

The Rad-57, which “comes in various models and colors”, is “easy to use, requiring no user calibration and no patient cooperation or consciousness”. It is hand-held, and uses “four AA alkaline batteries, which deliver over 8 hours of continuous monitoring, of SpO2, SpCO, SpMet, Pulse Rate, and Perfusion Index (PI)”. PI indicates aterial pulse signal strength and may be used as a diagnosis tool during low perfusion. 

Methemoglobin reduces the amount of oxygen carried in the hemoglobin. Methemoglobinemia can be caused by commonly prescribed drugs, drugs used in the hospital setting (25 including local anesthetics, nitroglycerin, and inhaled nitric oxide), and chemical fume inhalation. Elevations in methemoglobin levels are often unrecognized until symptoms become life-threatening. 

Previously, to measure carboxyhemoglobin, we had to have a patient blow up a very non-pliable balloon (trust me, it’s tough for a healthy person to do), and then attach the balloon to one of our old Industrial Scientific CO meters with a small pump attached. As the exhaled air passed through the pump, it gave a parts-per-million reading of CO, which we could cross-reference to a small chart, giving us an approximate percentage of carboxyhemoglobin in the patient’s blood. With the Rad-57, we turn it on, put the sensor on the patient’s finger, and in a few seconds, have an SpCO reading, in addition to SpO2, etc. Our Medic Units and Engine Companies have been carrying pulse oximeters for years, but the CO-oximetry technology just wasn’t around. 

Now, on to Hydrogen cyanide (HCN). This has become the “buzz word” and concern among the fire service recently. I’m not sure why HCN is the only concern, because there is so much “junk” in the smoke at fires now. Even with Haz Mat training, and 4 semesters of chemistry (B.S. in biology), I still have trouble pronouncing and figuring out the stuff we can breath in, well after a nickel and dime room-and-contents has been overhauled. That said, the Department is again thinking ahead and will be placing new 5-gas meters (combustible range, oxygen, hydrogen sulfide, CO, and HCN) on the 8 Rescue Squads to replace the aging 4-gas (no HCN) meters.

The base price for these units is around $3,000, but ours costs almost double that because it has methemoglobin sensors.  There are also pediatric cables available, which we did not get, for another $700.

Firegeezer adds:  Fairfax County is one of those rare departments in which the Hazardous Materials Company is independently staffed.  Their minimum-manning is 6, with a Captain and 3 Master Technicians on the lead unit and 2 M/Techs on the support unit.  At least one of the six will always be paramedic certified.

A PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION INTO THE PACKING PLANT FIRE that killed four firefighters in Warwickshire, England, has found that the fire officers were not given enough information before the fire occurred.

Another 230 tons of debris remains to be
removed from the site of the Nov. 2 fire.

The Health & Safety Executive (HSE) office has issued an “improvement order” to the Warwickshire Fire & Rescue Service.  The Press Association news agency reports:

Speaking at a press conference, Alan Craddock, head of operations for HSE in the Midlands, said: “As a result of our work on this investigation, HSE has formed the opinion, based on the evidence we have seen, that the current arrangements employed by the authority do not comply with the statutory duties to provide its firefighters with all the information they should have to assist them in making the appropriate decisions when attending a fire.”

Mr Craddock said the fire service had four months to improve their arrangements for providing information on aspects such as locality of the incident, particular hazards of the buildings involved and where a water supply can be found.

You can read the full story HERE.

BILL DELANEY, EDITOR OF the Washington-Metro Area Fire & Injury Prevention website, is reporting that two more D. C. area fire & rescue departments are implementing “Firefighters as educators” training.

Earlier the Washington-Metropolitan Council of Government’s Fire Prevention Subcommittee recommended that all recruits throughout the region complete the National Fire Academy’s Self-Study Course for Community Safety Educators (Q118)  as part of their initial training.

Read the full story on this good news HERE.