I'm providing this information to educate you and better prepare you for talking with fire service personnel or reading fire service (yes, like it or not, EMS is also fire related) textbooks or publications. Some fire service personnel tend to go a bit overboard when talking, by using too much "alphabet soup." I'm not providing this information to encourage you to use more abbreviations in your everyday life. He’s lead author of the Residential Fire Rescue book.In the fire service, we enjoy using abbreviations and acronyms for things. Mark van der Feyst has been a member of the fire service since 1999 and is a full-time firefighter in Ontario. With all of the changes instituted by NFPA and the technology incorporated into the SCBA, there is no excuse for any firefighter to leave the building with their low-air alarm going off. Perhaps this testing and training should be returned to on a regular basis to help build and reinforce muscle memory. This drill gave valuable information to each firefighter so that he or she would have a mental and physical feel for how much air the individual would use before the low-air alarm goes off. This was dictated by the type of cylinder each department was using. There was a time when air-consumption testing took place to show each firefighter how much air he or she was using in a set amount of time of 30, 45 and/or 60 minutes. By doing this, others will see and hopefully follow suit. The firefighter can have an impact on changing the culture by practising air-consumption checks all the time when using his or her SCBA. The change in culture also can take place from the bottom up – as Captain Michael Langford always says, “Water boils from the bottom up.” Why this method? The chief wants to show his membership the seriousness of not having enough air when the time comes and relying upon the low-air alarm to “tell you” that it is time to leave. The consequences are progressive and severe. The school of thinking in this arena needs to be changed and enforced so that the culture of the fire department is progressing for the better – this starts at the top with enforcement.Īn example of this is with the Mount Lebanon Fire Department in Pennsylvania where Fire Chief Nicholas Sohyda has a strict rule concerning low-air alarms exit a building with your low-air alarm going off and you must report to him to explain exactly why it occurred. The intended purpose of the low-air alarm is to provide the firefighter with enough air so that if he or she were to find themselves in a situation where he or she had to get out of the building, the individual would have enough air to get out and, if the firefighter got into trouble, still have some air left to bide some time for the RIT rescue. Unfortunately, there has been a parting away from this training as time marches on for the firefighter – the periodic check starts to wean away, and the end result is the low-air alarm going off while still inside the building. This periodic check is a part of being situationally aware which lends into knowing how much air you are using and how much you have left. In basic training, we instruct our new firefighters to monitor their air consumption when they are wearing an SCBA by periodically checking their air gauge. When the air in the cylinder starts to deplete away, the lights that are displayed on the HUD are also displayed on the SCBA for a complete 360-degree situational awareness factor: green, yellow and red. One particular SCBA manufacturer also added proximity lights on the back of the SCBA as well as on the front of the chest gauge so that all firefighters around can see exactly what the air status is for that particular user. Every SCBA manufacturer incorporated this extra safety feature into the facepiece somehow with a series of lights green meaning 50 per cent and more of air, yellow indicating 50 per cent of air left, and flashing red indicating less than 33 per cent of air remaining. This added component allows the user to visually see his or her air consumption status at all times. It also meant that the 2216 SCBA system was going to become insufficient in terms of providing enough air capacity for the end user.Īnother NFPA standard change was the integration of the Heads-Up Display (HUD) in the facepiece of the firefighter. This increase in the end-of-service alarm has prompted many fire departments to increase their air cylinder capacities – one-hour cylinders were becoming the trend to combat the low-air problem and to give firefighters as much air as possible to do their job. In light of this, NFPA standards for SCBA changed the requirements for the low-air alarm to go off at 25 per cent up to 33 per cent. A flashing red light indicates less than 33 per cent of air remaining.
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