BH is Back

[Bullethead 12]

During my training at Newcastle Airport...I was lucky enough to be allowed to sit in this baby!

 

Is that for if a UFO crashes? :).

 

Hmm - seems the fire fighters have come a long way, while the dogs - well, remained dogs.

 

Since that pic was taken, firemen haven't changed that much. That shows all the modern trends already in place: machinery doing all the work and the troops getting fat as a result. Go back to the mid-1800s and before, though, and firemen were real men. They pulled their own vehicles (horses being for girly-men), worked their pumps by hand (as on contemporary ships), and supplied their pumps via bucket brigades from wells and fountains instead of supply hoses from hydrants.

http://www.currierandives.com/galfire.htm

 

 

Nowadays, we ride in airconditioned comfort, have 400hp diesels turning our pumps, have 2000gpm hydrants ever 300 feet or so (at least in urban areas), ladders that raise themselves hydraulically, etc. We've gotten soft :).

Edited September 25, 2011 by Bullethead

[Hasse Wind 46]

We've gotten soft :).

 

Perhaps, but a lot more effective too.

[Bullethead 12]

Perhaps, but a lot more effective too.

 

I dunno. Back in the day, there was 2-4 guys at the point of attack on the end of a hose. These days it's the same. The main differences are:

 

1. That handful of guys doesn't require several dozen guys outside working the pump and passing buckets of water.

 

2. That handful of guys inside can get into more trouble than before, due to being dressed to withstand worse conditions, modern fires being hotter, and modern buildings falling down faster than older ones.

 

That latter point is currently a hot topic of professional debate. Because modern buildings burn hotter and faster, and fall down sooner, the time for doing aggressive interior operations for both rescue and extinguishment is considerably lower now than it was even a couple decades ago. The odds of victim survival in fire areas is also correspondingly lower. Thus, the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC) has recently published a set of "Rules of Engagement" that strike many as a betrayal of our main jobs of saving life and property. These rules center around making a call as to when viable victims are no longer possible and then going to pretty much extrior operations. Only interior operations have much chance of saving the building, so (while this is an over-generalization) these RoEs are perceived by many as "if there's nobody alive in there, screw it."

 

A lot of firemen have a big problem with this. Most times, there's nobody to rescue because everybody got out under their own power, so it's mostly about saving buildings and their contents. Plus, they knew the job was dangerous when they took it, groove on adrenaline, etc. If they don't almost get killed, they consider it a waste of time. Personally, while I'm as much an adrenaline junky as the next fireman, I have no problems with these RoEs because I don't want to get killed over an empty building. You need something way more glorious to get into Valhalla :). So these RoEs have had no effect on how I determine the extent of intgerior ops. We go into vacant buildings if it appears we can do some good without it falling on us, and we get out of occupied buildings if they look about to fall on us.