BURNING QUESTIONS, PART 2
BY TOM BRENNAN
We will continue with our list of some of the factors that are contributing to the growing number of firefighters who are being seriously burned in today`s fire service.
Position
Firefighters are inside these structures in positive-pressure Nomext balls. If you combine this with positive-pressure fans at the onset of operations, today`s firefighter is extremely comfortable compared with his father`s fire service as well as his grandfather`s. There is generally no personal distress reason for today`s space age firefighter to crawl along the wall of the inside of a fire building. At flashover, the only survival technique (to give you any chance for survival escape) is if you detect that the back areas of your body are beginning to burn while you are face down on the floor. If the phenomenon occurs and you are on your feet, there is no escape. NONE. If I leave one thought–and only one–with my brother and sister firefighters as I leave earth, it would be this: “If you cannot see, CRAWL!” That one fact will save lives and prevent many painful and disabling injuries.
“Retarded Operations”
We are moving slower inside these burning structures because of mandatory (a good thing) mask policy. If you have an opportunity to observe fully encapsulated and positive-pressured firefighters in a training scenario within building enclosures, they bunch up in “clots” and move to very random locations very, very slowly. The same factors cause the hoselines to slow down also. A bad thing. Flashover prevention depends on cooling materials inside the fire compartment as quickly as possible. Rapid access and rapid cooling will shut down the ignition temperature gases issuing from combustibles that fuel flashover and will make flashover a nonevent.
Number of Personnel
Oops! We can go on forever here. If you want to run ambulances, paint sidewalks, put on fire prevention shows, run courses and seminars for civilians, perform building inspection, install smoke detectors, and any other “new” mission of the fire service, then staffing doesn`t mean squat. But if you have to fight one fire inside a structure–or you “want” to fight the fire from inside because of the life hazard (known, seen, or suspected), then staff-ing is mandatory. And I don`t care what the retired firefighters (questionable at best) who have now become paid consultants in a world they now spit on say, as they tell elected officials (budget decision makers) that personnel can be reduced more and more until only the truck arrives brought there by a driver and no firefighters.
The building must be made to behave before flashover and other phenomena like rollover and partial collapse and cold smoke explosions occur.
The functions to support the inward movement of a handline must be ongoing all at once–not “nickeled and dimed” and the random choices of one or two firefighters who for some reason didn`t get a chance to “grab a nozzle”!
Ventilation is a lost art because the firefighter doesn`t need it any more and, in fact, not enough firefighters arrive on the scene all at once to make it effective. But the building needs controlled ventilation before it explodes and puts unaware, but protected, firefighters into oblivion. Politicians have been told by these prostitutional experts that new lightweight, smaller-diameter hoselines can be stretched with fewer personnel. Sure! But interior operation of that handline needs the supervised, cooperative operational speed of a minimum of three firefighters and one officer who doesn`t have a supergloved hand on the hose himself.
Another fact: Small-diameter hose must move forward in the firefight. If the fire stops it, there is no holding action possible with this type of hose–the fire wins! The answer is simple: You must get a backup line or another hoseline of larger diameter. From where? Where are the personnel? And we are worrying about rapid intervention super entry and rescue teams. You cannot fight a structure fire for any amount of time with four firefighters inside and four firefighters outside who are held in check and made ready to jump into a degrading condition that they, too, cannot control. So, put all these reasons, and others you may think of, together, and we will continue to burn our firefighters more horribly than ever before, even though we are going to fewer fires and are better protected than at any time in history. Learn to make the workplace–the interior of the fire building–safe!
TOM BRENNAN has more than 35 years of fire service experience. His career spans more than 20 years with the Fire Department of New York as well as four years as chief of the Waterbury (CT) Fire Department. He was the editor of Fire Engineering for eight years and currently is a technical editor. He is co-editor of The Fire Chief`s Handbook, Fifth Edition (Fire Engineering Books, 1995). He is the recipient of the 1998 Fire Engineering Lifetime Achievement Award.
