If you were at the FDIC this past April, you may have noticed or even experienced the BullEx Fire Safety Trailer that featured kitchen, bedroom and industrial emergency scenarios. It even simulated an earthquake with lighting, sound effects and realistic props.
FIRE CHIEF Editor Glenn Bischoff spoke with Russell Herman, BullEx’s senior account executive, about some of the new technologies and capabilities that have been added to the company’s fire-prevention safety trailer.
Click here to watch the video.
To learn more about the Fire Safety Trailers, visit the BullEx website.
By Ryan Maye Handy
For The Gazette
Colorado Springs Fire Chief Rich Brown plans to turn several southeast fire stations into basic preventive-care clinics where residents can stop by for such things as blood pressure and blood sugar checks.
A two-hour blood pressure check clinic at three fire stations on Tuesday was just the beginning of Brown’s vision, he said. In the coming weeks, he hopes that people can go to fire stations for non-emergency check ups, such as getting an EKG done, instead of calling 911 for basic problems.
“We are going 100 miles an hour towards that end,” Brown said.
Brown briefly discussed the clinic intiative at Mayor Steve Bach’s second Town Hall meeting Wednesday night at the Southeast YMCA off Jet Wing Drive. About 100 residents listened while Bach discussed his plans for improving housing quality, parks, and job opportunities in that part of town.
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By Lou DeRosa for Fire Chief
The Madison (N.J.) Fire Department has employed compressed-air foam systems since 1998, and they are used on every fire the department responds to today, replacing the plain water used in prior years. But though CAFS is being used in all aspects of the fireground, it is not a magic potion. Rather, it simply is a powerful, efficient and effective tool that, when used properly, offers tremendous extinguishing advantages and increases the safety of the firefighters who use it.
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By Jessica A. York
for the Times-Herald
VALLEJO, Calif. — The call comes in — a Vallejo home is on fire.
Firefighters rush to the scene, observe blacked-out windows and smoke pouring from the chimney. Inside, utter darkness, perhaps a bag of fertilizer by the door.
Two recent residential fires that turned out to be rented homes converted into marijuana-growing facilities have prompted the Vallejo Fire Department to assess what could be a new threat for firefighters and the city, department Battalion Chief Dave Urrutia said.
Urrutia responded to one of the recent grow-house fires and also spent time in a converted grow house outside Vallejo after a police bust. As a result, he said he has begun establishing new training standards for the department.
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From the NFA site:
The National Fire Academy is currently recruiting students to help pilot test its first online instructor mediated course, Advanced Principles of Fire and Emergency Services Safety and Survival (C249). The course will be delivered through NFA Online at: www.nfaonline.dhs.gov
An online instructor mediated course balances self-study components with interactions and discussions between the students and the instructor. This course is done in an asynchronous fashion. Students and the instructor will likely be online at different times and will post and respond to discussions on their own schedule. After reviewing the self-study materials, the students will have the opportunity to participate in discussions with other students on various assigned topics. The instructor will open each module, provide feedback on assignments, summarize discussions, and provide mentoring to meet the unique needs of individual students.
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April is National Autism Awareness Month, 1 in 166 people are diagnosed with autism; a spectrum of Pervasive Developmental Disorders that affects the brain. This has gone up from 1 in 500 five years ago.
Is your department trained on how to handle autistic people in an emergency situation?
By Lisa A. Flam
For Health on TODAY
As an experienced firefighter and a devoted father to an autistic son, Bill Cannata is combining the two worlds he knows so well to help protect others.
Being in a fire can be confusing and overwhelming — especially for someone with autism, saysCannata, a fire captain in Westwood, Mass. And autistic people may react in a way that seems combative to emergency first responders. His mission: teaching first responders around the country how to identify someone with autism and how best to help them in an emergency, when every second counts.
Cannata knows about autism first-hand: His 21-year-old son, Ted, who has the disorder, is unable to speak and is highly sensitive to sight, sound and touch.
“They’re going to react differently,” Cannata told TODAY. “They’re going to resist rescue because of the confusion. They may have extreme behaviors because of the situation.”
Click here for the full article and accompanying video.
By Jason Zigmont
For FireRescue1.com
It seems like everywhere you turn there is an amazing video of a fire response, no matter if it is good or bad. The availability of helmet cams makes a real point of view available for review and learning.
Most times the video is “ooo’d” and “aah’d” at, but is it used effectively as a quality-improvement tool? There are ways that every service can use videos effectively and avoid the common pitfalls.
Video recording of events have been around since the invention of the handheld camera. It was not until the Internet age that videos became regularly available to the public.
Now anyone with a cell phone can take a video of a scene and have it posted on YouTube within minutes. This can air your dirty laundry in public as it becomes hard to control videos that are posted online.
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By Gregory Havel
For FireEngineering.com
During the late 20th century as the price of petroleum products steadily increased, renewable energy sources became more attractive. Technologies have been developed to use solar energy to generate heat and electricity for buildings.
The most important concerns for firefighters regarding solar collectors include the following:
- They can prevent or interfere with firefighter access to roofs for ventilation or other operations.
- They can prevent or interfere with firefighter exterior access to windows for ventilation or rescue operations.
- When they are installed on an existing building, they provide an eccentric load on the wall, or they may exceed the live load allowance in the engineering calculations for the roof.
- They cannot be turned off. Although they can be isolated from the building’s electrical or heat system by switches, circuit breakers, or valves, the collectors themselves will continue to produce electricity or heat as long as they are exposed to sunlight. Some photovoltaic cells are so sensitive that they will produce some electricity from exposure to street lighting. Although covering these collectors with salvage covers or opaque tarps will reduce their electrical or heat output, firefighters may still be exposed to electric shock or hot-water burns.
- They can add significant weight to a structure that was not designed to carry them.
- If solar collector panels are broken during firefighting operations, the firefighters in the area can be injured by electrical shock or hot-water burns.
Read the full article on FireEngineering.com.
By Guy Colonna
For NFPA Journal
Every year, nearly 100 people across the country die in what are known as “confined spaces.” These are areas that can be dangerous because they possess limited means for entry and exit, have unfavorable natural ventilation that can contribute to the creation and buildup of atmospheric hazards, and are not intended for continuous human occupancy. Confined spaces span a wide range of industries and uses, including storage tanks, process vessels, hoppers, bins, silos, sewers, boilers, utility vaults, pipelines and pipe tunnels, and cargo spaces and holds on marine vessels. Steel mills, paper mills, chemical plants, refineries, public utilities, construction sites, recycling facilities, grain silos — they all contain confined spaces.
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By Charles Bailey
For FireRescue1.com
The complicated confluence of firefighting techniques, training, tactics and practice is difficult to model. That is to say that it is hard to create a repeatable situation where one can isolate one variable from the next and come to some realistic conclusions as to the “right” answer.
In many ways this statement lends credence to those who argue that laboratory experiments, no matter how well-funded or how well-instrumented, cannot be practically applied to the so called “real world” firefighting situations.
Despite the complexity however, it is critically important to take the laboratory work and apply it as much as is possible to the real world because some things are true whether we can model them in their entirety or not. Let’s examine three key points from recent fire research and one from the annals of common sense and consider how they can be applied to the real world.
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