NEW TOOLSADDRESSES THE FIREFIGHTER`S FIRST PRIORITY
BY JOHN A. ODDO
CONCEIVING THE DEVICE
The lieutenant instructed us to take the door. We realized there was a lot of fire in the apartment because the paint was blistering and bubbling off the door. Suddenly the door burst into flames. Patty and I were probies at our first fire with Ladder 35 in Manhattan, and we had never seen anything like this before. We were in shock! The lieutenant backed us away and told the engine to open the line and knock down the fire on the door. We worked on the door again with the halligan, and it burst into flames again. They hit it with water, and we finally popped the door open. A huge fireball jumped out at us and knocked all of us on our butts. The fire blew for a moment and then sucked in a little air, so we could see most of the way into this small apartment. The engine moved in and knocked down the fire, then we went in and did our search, which was easy. The fire had sucked in so much air that we could see pretty well.
We heard on the radio that there was no second truck, so we were on our own. The lieutenant told us that the engine was knocking this fire down and that we had to go with him to the floor above and search that apartment. (I had thought we were done!)
The lieutenant took us upstairs and told us to take the door of this much larger apartment. When we got the door open, it was just a sheet of black inside the apartment. Patty and I backed away, but the lieutenant took two steps in, and he was completely gone! I remember Patty and I looking at each other, wearing an expression that said, “Where did he go?” We heard his voice from inside this black abyss saying, “Okay guys, come on!”
We walked in, and the lieutenant told us to get down and search. I went along a wall to the left; Patty went to the right. When I passed through a doorway and turned again, I didn`t have a clue as to where I was. It felt as big as Yankee Stadium, and I was going around and around. Every now and then I heard the lieutenant calling, “John, are you all right in there? Are you in trouble?” And I`d answer, “Yeah, I`m all right, I`m doing okay.” Then I`d hear him say, “Patty, you all right?” And Patty would say, “Well, I really don`t know where I am, but I`m all right.”
The lieutenant knew exactly what had happened to us. When the smoke started to clear, I could see that I was in a small room, not even 10 feet by 10 feet. I thought I had crawled through room after room. This Yankee Stadium turned out to be a walk-in closet. I couldn`t believe it! I was still on my hands and knees, and the lieutenant walked over and asked, “John, everything okay?”
I responded, “Yeah, but I think I got lost in this closet.”
“Oh, that`s okay,” he said. “I knew where you were. I just went to see about the back bedrooms.”
I was really disappointed! I found Patty and told him that all I had searched was this stupid closet.
“Oh yeah,” he countered. “Let me show you where I was.”
Patty had climbed over a refrigerator that had fallen across the end of the hallway. When he turned to come back, he thought the refrigerator was a wall. He went around and around in this little area. Even though the lieutenant kept calling to him, Patty was really nervous. He knew he was lost. It was black. It was a scary thing to happen at his first fire.
The lieutenant told us we did great. He was a little nervous about being responsible for two probies, but he knew exactly where we were and that we were okay. He had searched the kitchen, the bathroom, and a couple of bedrooms while we went around in our little circles.
I was so disappointed that this was my first search. It felt like Yankee Stadium, but it was nothing. I had gotten lost in a closet!
* * *
Looking back at my first fire 15 years ago, I realize now how easy it was to get lost. Today, I`m an experienced FDNY firefighter. I spent 13 years with Ladder 35 in Manhattan and two years as a lieutenant with Engine 247 in Brooklyn. As an officer, I realize that not only probies get lost–experienced firefighters also get lost.
One evening in 1991, we had a fire in the subcellar of a residential high-rise in midtown Manhattan. We had heavy smoke pushing out of all the ground-level vents and doorways. I had the outside vent position, so my job was to relay conditions on the outside to my officer on the inside team and to try to vent where I could. After surveying the outside, I found that there was nothing to vent, and I realized that the fire was not on the first floor but was down below street level. I entered the rear of the building and started to make my way to the subcellar to join up with my officer and the inside team, which had entered the building from the front.
I went down through long hallways and different areas of the building. We were having trouble with radio communication because we were in pretty deep. I finally made contact with my officer when I reached the entrance of a vast open room that was stacked full of construction supplies and piles of demolition debris, some of it burning. The inside team of the truck company had hooked up a search line, and the engine had stretched a hoseline. I made my way down the search line through heavy smoke toward the sound of an operating hoseline. The engine and truck had been operating for a while, and some of the firefighters were starting to run out of air. My tank was almost full, so I took over the hoseline and waited for more engine personnel.
Visibility was very poor. All we could see were huge piles of burning embers. When relief arrived, I handed off the hoseline and continued operating for a period of time. Then my low-air warning went off. I told my officer that I would follow the hoseline out, change my cylinder, and come right back.
As I was crawling out, there was zero visibility. I used the sound of the operating hoseline to orient myself. The sound was coming from behind me, so the way to the street was away from the sound.
When I was about halfway out, they shut down the hoseline. Just about then, I bumped into a guy who was coming in. I moved off the hoseline to let him pass, since he was heading into the fire. I crawled two steps to the left and told him, “Go, go, go.” I crawled two steps to the right, expecting to be back on the hoseline. No hoseline! I crawled two more steps to the right. No hoseline! I crawled a couple of more steps, and still no hoseline! I said to myself, “Okay, now you`ve gone too far.” I crawled back a couple of steps, a couple of more steps–and still nothing. I said, “Okay, I`ll do a search pattern.” I did a widening circular search pattern, but this completely screwed me up. I got completely turned around and still couldn`t find the hoseline!
I was very nervous at this point. My low-air alarm was going off, and I was trying to see how much air I had left. I didn`t have very much at all. I couldn`t hear anybody. I couldn`t see anybody. I purged my mask and pulled it away for a moment so I could call out, “Is anybody there?” No answer.
At that point, I became even more nervous. I was thinking about transmitting a mayday on my radio. My anxiety level was rising. I was trying to keep myself calm and keep my wits about me. I pulled my mask away from my face again for a moment and yelled for anybody who could hear me. This time I heard a guy say, “Yeah, over here.” I crawled in the direction of the voice and found a man over the hoseline, less than 10 feet away. I scrambled out as fast as I could because I knew I was almost out of air. As I got close enough to the exit to be able to see light, I saw that I was sucking the last breath from my tank. By the time I got to the street, I had caught my breath again. I got a fresh tank and headed back in. All together, I used four tanks of air on that job.
I was an experienced firefighter, not a probie, but one wrong turn had almost cost me my life. It happened to me, and it can happen to anyone.
* * *
Since I`ve been on the job, I`ve been to 29 funerals for firefighters who died in the line of duty. Sometimes you lose a friend, but you can only grieve for the moment before you have to move on and push it to the back of your mind. You don`t really think it could happen to you, and you tend to push those thoughts away because you`re a firefighter and you have to function.
In 1992-1993, just before I was promoted to lieutenant, we lost a number of firefighters in FDNY. It didn`t seem like a trend at the time–we`re firefighters, and sometimes we lose guys. That`s the job. Maybe it seemed as if there were a few deaths in a relatively short time, but no one realized at the time that we had entered a period of increasing firefighter deaths and that there were more to come.
A group of firefighters and I were promoted to lieutenant and attended classes together. At the time, we were mostly concerned with learning about the paperwork and administrative duties of a lieutenant. We also talked among ourselves about how we were going to act with the guys at new fire stations.
A couple of weeks into school, a very bad fire in Manhattan killed two men and left one in critical condition. We buried Firefighters James Young and Chris Seidenberg on the same day. I had never experienced attending two funerals on the same day. Captain John Drennan was badly burned and fought for his life for weeks before finally succumbing to his injuries. These deaths rocked the entire department and shook up everybody at the school. Now we realized that something was wrong, something was different. That was when we new officers started to talk among ourselves about the possibility of “losing one of our own.” That scared everybody. The thought that I could lose one of my guys while I survived was just unacceptable. I didn`t think I could live with myself if that happened.
We realized all at once that this was what being an officer was all about. All that administrative stuff was nonsense. The officer`s first priority is to get his firefighters and himself home safe after every tour.
Shortly after the funerals of Young and Seidenberg, we had a mask confidence course. Using inside teams of three, one would be the officer and the other two the firefighters. We were allowed to conduct this course any way we chose. In this scenario, we had to wear blackout masks and search for victims on the floor above a fire in a tenement building. Sometime during the drill, the fire would get out of control and all would be ordered to evacuate the building. The idea was to get as many victims out as possible in a rapidly deteriorating situation. We decided to leave one person at the door and have the other two search so that if there were a problem finding our way out, the person at the door could call to us and get us reoriented by the sound of his voice. Sometimes we would have to have the person at the door come to help with a large victim, so we would lose the advantage of following a voice out to the door.
We talked it over among ourselves and realized that we had a problem. With the deaths of Young and Seidenberg, the daily reports of Captain Drennan`s condition, and all the talk of our responsibility for the lives of our firefighters, we were really a bunch of nervous lieutenants. We were worried about our members getting lost and dying in a fire, and we realized that there was a gap in firefighter safety that had never been addressed.
That was when I conceived the idea of a sound-producing device that could be left at the entrance to a smoke-filled fireground. The sound would serve to keep firefighters oriented while they were working, and it would act as a sound beacon if they had to find the exit.
Captain Drennan died more than a month after the fire, and it was as if a black shroud had fallen over the city of New York and the department. Firefighters and civilians alike were all pulling and praying for him. We were holding on to a desperate hope that he would live, but it was not to be.
Right after the funeral, I decided to present my idea to the FDNY Research and Development section. R&D liked the idea but explained that it was not set up to develop new ideas, only to test and evaluate existing tools on the market.
I figured that that was the end of it, and it was just a fanciful idea that would never go anywhere. Still, I bounced the idea off some firefighters and civilian friends, and they all thought it was a great idea. They encouraged me to follow through and not give up on it and suggested that I build it myself and show it to the R&D people.
A couple of civilian friends were very curious about the idea, and they asked me if I would mind if they tried to put together a prototype. A few weeks later they showed me a working model. It was kind of crude and too big, but I was shocked that my idea had become a reality.
I then went to Deputy Chief Vincent Dunn, under whom I had worked while in midtown Manhattan and whom I respect highly as a firefighter and an officer. I showed him the device and asked if he thought the idea was viable. He liked the idea very much and referred to it as “the missing link in fire safety.” He pointed out that most of the new safety devices, such as PASS alarms, were meant to deal with disaster protection after a firefighter becomes trapped but that my proposed device was geared toward preventing a disaster. Since most of the deaths from flashover resulted from firefighters` becoming lost and disoriented in smoke and being unable to find a safe exit quickly, my proposed device would save lives, he added. His encouragement prompted me to continue with the project.
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DEVELOPING THE DEVICE BY MICHAEL T. ALTILIO
When I received John Oddo`s first phone call about his sound beacon for firefighters, I leaped at the chance to join the project. I`ve had an interest in firefighter safety since the day I was born. My dad, Dan Altilio, is a retired FDNY firefighter.
We set out to develop a device that would be as functional and reliable as possible. The prototype device, which was ultimately abandoned, was a nightmarish tangle of wires and circuit boards, most of which were adapted from other products. To reduce the number of connections and components that could fail, a single-chip computer was used to handle all the sound generation, timing, and control functions, making it possible to alter the sound and customize the timing for any special application without making changes in hardware. Independent circuitry checks the computer at least once every second. If anything goes wrong, the computer is forced to reboot.
All critical components are embedded in high temperature resin for protection from water and rapid temperature changes. The internal wiring is made from premium, silver-plated copper with extra heavy TeflonT insulation. Components and connectors have a safety margin of at least 100 percent.
The trickiest part of the project was getting the sound right. The goal was to make the homing sound extremely penetrating but highly directional at the same time. Some safety devices beep or shriek and can be heard well enough, but you can`t really tell from where the sound is coming. The sound beacon tricks the ear into hearing a low-frequency, directional sound while actually using only the higher frequencies of a penetrating sound. If you can hear the sound at all, you instantly will know the direction of the source. The beacon`s synthesized sound is extremely energy efficient, allowing the device to run continuously for hours on the small internal battery before a recharge is needed.
FIELD TESTING
Once we had developed a device we believed to be reliable, we showed it to a number of firefighters, who literally kicked it around for awhile. As a result of the tests, the device was improved. For example, one of our early prototypes had a carry handle on top and sound ports on two sides, but no side handle. A lieutenant picked it up and placed it in a corner so that both sound ports were blocked. The question arose, Could the device end up this way in a fire? It`s not likely, but anything can happen in a fire. We resolved that potential problem by adding a side handle, which prevents the device from coming to rest in a stable position with both sound ports blocked.
We abused, froze, burned, and drowned the device before arriving at what we considered a dependable device. The sound was tested during drills in which firefighters performed searches with blackout masks in various types of building construction, both with and without the device in operation. We found that our test subjects always searched faster and more effectively with the device in operation because they remained oriented. They were much less likely to get twisted around because the mental map of the search area always remained firmly anchored at one point: the safe exit.
We also ran a drill similar to the lieutenants` mask confidence course described above. Firefighters searched with blackout masks for a period of time and then were given an order to get out as quickly as possible. First we ran a traditional drill without the device, and most subjects tried to retrace their path back to the entrance, no matter how roundabout that path might be. A few brave souls tried to crawl directly to the exit and usually ended up crashing into a wall and having to start a search pattern for the exit.
With the device in operation, every firefighter without exception made a beeline for the exit and never wasted time to retrace his path. The time required to evacuate was reduced to just seconds. No one got lost; no one hesitated. With the device in operation, getting out quickly with no wrong turns became practically instinctive.
To confirm that the device would perform under real fire conditions, we worked with New York`s Rescue 1 personnel at a live burn at the Nassau County Fire Academy. The unit was put into operation at the entrance to the smokehouse. Rescue 1, in full gear, was sent into the high heat and heavy smoke of a fuel oil fire. Test subjects reported that the sound of the device cut through the thick smoke and high heat and maintained excellent directional properties.
THE FINAL PRODUCT
The Target Exit DeviceTM (TEDTM) consists of a loud horn in a rugged enclosure with a high-intensity strobe. Every 10 seconds, it emits a short series of penetrating tones. The remainder of the time it remains silent, leaving time to listen for victims or to give and receive voice commands. The specially synthesized tones have a highly directional quality, which instantly provide orientation to firefighters in heavy smoke. Anyone within earshot can follow the sound to a safe exit. TED is designed to prevent firefighters` disorientation in smoke that can lead to their becoming lost and running out of air while attempting to exit.
An important feature allows the incident commander to control the device and to sound an emergency evacuation signal by means of a small, digitally coded transmitter. This is a separate, completely different sound that carries the meaning “Everybody out!” The evacuation signal of a TED can`t be confused with any other sounds, such as sirens or air horns, and thus can serve to enhance firefighter safety.
In an ironic note, Patty–that probie who got lost with John Oddo at their first fire–is now a seasoned veteran with Rescue 1 in New York and was one of the firefighters who tested the device at the live burn. The story comes full circle. n
n MICHAEL T. ALTILIO is a design engineer and has been an innovator in the design and manufacture of electronic sound equipment for more than 20 years. He is president of Grand Design, Inc. and a consultant to Safety Systems, Inc., the manufacturer of the Target Exit DeviceTM.
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(Left) The Target Exit DeviceTM. (Photo by Robert M. Lewent.) (Right) The Target Exit DeviceTM is left at the entrance to the fireground. (Photo by author.)
JOHN A. ODDO is a 15-year veteran of the City of New York (NY) Fire Department. He served with Ladder 35 in Manhattan for 13 years and has been a lieutenant with Engine 247 in Brooklyn since 1994. He is on the Division 8 Safety Committee and is the cofounder of Safety Systems, Inc., the manufacturer of the Target Exit DeviceTM.
