Fire Science Show
Fire Science Show
122 - Compartment Fire Behaviour Training with Shan Raffel, CFBT Roy and Szymon Kokot
When I heard that two legends of firefighting training Shan Raffel and CFBT Roy will be visiting my friend Szymon Kokot, I packed my stuff and went to meet them with a microphone and a ton of questions. What I received was a brilliant discussion on how firefighting instructors are trained - from the history of CFBT (Compartment Fire Behaviour Training) to modern approaches. Shan introduced his method for reading fire (BE SAHF - Building Environment Smoke Air-track Heat and Flame) and how it helps the decision-making process in the most stressful settings. Along the way, we discuss the critical soft character traits that make a fire instructor exceptional, and how the art of decision-making and critical thinking can be integrated into the complex realm of fire science.
As we wrap up, we emphasize the significant role of understanding fire behavior in handling emergency situations. We will also broach the topic of cold, gray smoke, a seemingly harmless phenomenon but one that poses a formidable danger. Learn why experienced instructors are key to imparting this knowledge and how Poland, under Szymon's leadership, has made significant strides in fire instruction.
Also, if you would like to read more, here is the most amazing collection of resources you can find online: https://eurofirefighter.com/downloads
Shan's book can be found at https://cfbt-int.com/manuals/ or at Amazon, or perhaps you may want to find the CFBT people in your country to make a worthy connection?! Through his website, you can also connect to organize instructor training in your country.
Cover picture credit: CFBT Intl https://cfbt-int.com/
Fire Science Show is sponsored by OFR Consultants, huge shoutout for their long-lasting support to our mission!
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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.
Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show. When I've started this podcast, I've made it a part of my mission to build a bridge between the firefighters and fire engineers, and when I heard that my friend Shimon who you may remember from Episode 51, is organizing a very nice workshop for fire instructors and he actually brought to Poland some legends of this field Sean Raphael and CfBT Roy I thought I have to grab my microphone, drive 400 kilometers and interview these guys on what they're up to. I hope to learn about the training itself and how it's built and what they're doing. But I've got much more from this discussion. I've received three independent success stories, one coming from Sweden, where Roy tells me about how this new approach into training was developed and how it led to amazing improvements in the decrease of firefighter deaths on duty. Sean told me about how this was introduced in Australia and how he developed the framework Be safe that he used to read fires and how this became the skeleton of new curriculum that was taught to new instructors. And Shimon told me how, for 10 years, he'd been implementing this in Poland. These three stories converge not just on fire science and understanding how they read fires, but also on the soft character traits that you would expect from a fire instructor or from a firefighter. How to take immediate decisions based on limited knowledge that you have. How to obtain knowledge. How to not be afraid of making mistakes and just fixing them. How to implement critical thinking. A lot of uncommon ideas to teaching quite uncommon people the firefighting instructors. I hope everyone can get a lot from this talk, but both from understanding the world of firefighting a bit better, but also on how to actually spread the knowledge. In such a complex, multifaceted discipline as fire science is. I think these guys had found some really neat ways how to spread this knowledge in a way that people understand it. So, yeah, it was absolutely worth to try 400 kilometers for that. So let's spin the intro and jump into the episode. Welcome to the Firesize Show. My name is Vojci Winksiński and I will be your host.
Speaker 1:Firesize Show is brought to you in collaboration with OFR Consultants, a multi-award winning independent consultancy dedicated to addressing fire safety challenges. Ofr is the UK's leading fire risk consultancy. Its globally established team has developed a reputation for preeminent fire engineering expertise, with colleagues working across the world to help protect people, property and environment, Establishing the UK in 2016 as a startup business of two highly experienced fire engineering consultants. The business has grown phenomenally in just six years, with offices across the country in seven locations, from Edinburgh to Bath. Colleagues are on a mission to continually explore the challenges that fire creates for clients and society, applying the best research experience and diligence for effective tailored solutions. Recent growth has seen it continue to build on its globally established reputation, advancing its journey to net zero, including embarking upon carbon balancing journey with the world land trust, and recruiting more of the fire sector's best talent, with a team that now exceeds 100 professionals In 2023. Ofr is growing its team and is keen to hear from industry professionals who would like to collaborate on fire safety futures. Get in touch at OFRconsultantscom.
Speaker 1:Hello everybody, welcome to the fire science show. Today we have some sort of discussion panel, I guess, because I'm joined here by three gentlemen who came to Poland to teach fire safety instructors, firefighters, on how to act in fires. I'm joined by Mr Szoenerfell. Nice to meet you, sir. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Hi, nice to be here. Yeah, we're gonna have to figure out what CFBT means in just a second. And my good friend Szymon Kokon, hi Szymon, Hi Wojciech.
Speaker 2:pleasure to be here again and to be joined with my friends as well.
Speaker 1:Thanks, thanks for bringing those nice people to Poland and, as I understand, you are here to train our Polish instructors who will then pick up the torch and teach firefighters in Poland how to act in fires. I see opportunity in here that fire engineers don't really know. What you guys are up to we are using as fire engineers if I can be the voice of fire engineering here we are using these big words. We design system for firefighters, we design buildings to assist firefighters. I've recently gave a webinar in one country where they told me explicitly they do design systems only for firefighters. The question is do we really do that? And then we really lack seeking the voice of the other side as engineers. So I'm grateful for you taking the invite to do this recording and let's see. What do you teach? What do you look for? So, sion, what are you up to?
Speaker 3:Okay, so this is my third time, I think, in Poland. The first time was about 10 years ago, when Szymon invited me over and we had some very detailed discussions about the new direction in fire training, which was compartment fire behaviour training, as opposed to the old way of lighting really big fires and pushing people in there to make them tough and learn what heat feels like.
Speaker 1:So you added buildings to the equation, not just fire as a fire itself, but fire in a setting, which is the building of the compartment.
Speaker 3:So we say compartment, fire behaviour training. So compartment can mean in a room in a large structure, it can be in an aircraft, it could be in a marine environment. So it's generally the principles of how fire develops and behaves in modern compartments and understanding that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, cool Roy. I know a lot of that comes from Sweden and that Sweden was some sort of one of the first places where it started.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so the term CFPT actually comes from the UK, From the UK. Yeah, that became a thing after UK. Actually, I think it was. If I'm not mistaken, it was John Taylor.
Speaker 3:John Taylor was one of the pioneers. He wrote, I think, four articles in the IFA Journal think it was around 1994 and they really sparked my interest and created my connections into Sweden.
Speaker 4:So it's a whole story. I mean, I don't talk just about the story. It's just about like two hours, you know.
Speaker 4:So I'm trying to summarize this in a few seconds. So we have two fires in Sweden, where we have then casualties, and there are these two guys who are then the old style fire engineers, fire officers, that's Mats Rosander and Kristi Gieselsson. So they look into this and they say we have to study this and what happened. Because, you know, we were talking in terms that some people even today talked about like oh, it was like some unexpected event, you know.
Speaker 4:And they said no, no, no, no, there is something here. They realized. Well, smoke contains few. I would like to say it like that, because not all smoke is few, but smoke contains few. So it's actually going to ignite. That's one thing. And ventilation has an impact, of course. And then we have the third factor, which was the time to reaching flash over. It wasn't really. There was nothing there that wasn't being said. I think you can go 100 years before that, or even more, and ventilation had an impact. That was being said by the 1920s or something yeah.
Speaker 4:It was even before then, I think.
Speaker 2:James Brayton was 1886.
Speaker 4:Exactly. But it's like the fire risk has this tendency to forget and we don't like that. Other people find out stuff. You have to find this out by yourself.
Speaker 4:So these guys, then they start training people and yeah, well, maybe the use of terminology at the time was not scientifically based, but they were telling a story that so this happens, it's defy the valves this way and suddenly for everyone there in Sweden it made sense.
Speaker 4:They can understand, you can predict. Because if you understand what needs to for a backdrop to happen or for a flash off to happen, then you say, well, I can do this, I can do this. Together with that, maths and crystal, especially maths, then develops the technique called gas cooling technique, which is to deal with the gases, not create an over pressure with steam, and to allow you to enter the corridor, walk through the corridor in a safe way and then actually reach the fire, instead of, just as he was saying at the time, what he was taught and he was even in Toronto and he was in LA, and what he was being taught there was like you crawl, you don't put water in the smoke, and that dramatically changed then the safety, because now you have knowledge. So, instead of being reactive, you can be proactive.
Speaker 3:Christopher is a really amazing character. He looked at what was happening today in his time, in mid 1970s, and the world was changing at that time because we were going from natural products, which have between 15 and 18 megajoules per kilogram, into plastics or proliferating throughout in built environment, which has, between you know, 35 and 45 megajoules per kilogram, and they were noticing a different fire behaviour. And Christopher was a really amazing fellow because he said right, the current textbook is not matching the current environment. We need to do something. So basically he rewrote the textbook. He went back, did extensive research, did hundreds of burns in acquired structures in older villages and he really rewrote the entire procedures, I think, for firefighting based on the modern built environment. But it wasn't actually appreciated by the management at the time. It took several years. The generation he trained several years later were a position of authority and they were the ones that sort of put it into the common use.
Speaker 1:You call it fire behaviour and you told me, like you don't use the term fire science, you use term fire behaviour, fire dynamics, fire dynamics okay, sorry, yeah, fire dynamics. I wonder, was there any connection to the fire science of that time? Like Philip Thomas, scott Morgan, james Quintery, yeah, so what they did then?
Speaker 4:they described fire behaviour in a way it was based on science as much as they could, but the terminology maybe was not the best they used actually for a back trip. It was called something like delayed flash over everything was based on flash over and the limits of flammability.
Speaker 4:So, to make the story then continue, what happens then is that Sweden then, in 86, after Armenia earthquake, established the four colleges so we have four national colleges in Sweden and then all the education that was being done was implemented. It was a good balance. Well, the ruling Sweden is like it's a 50% theory and it's 50% practical. You have to understand what you're doing and you have to choose. To Philip yeah, more than Philip I was rehearsed and you know you don't watch us academics there. Nothing wrong with that, but you don't want just people good at practice but not understanding the problem. So you need to combine. Then what happens then? Suddenly Sweden, as the only country in the world, I think, that can say that. I'm not quite sure about the number, but I think that for 26 years there hasn't been any death on a firefighter due to fire. Okay, it's not fire related, very specific.
Speaker 4:And then everyone has to know what's going on. So that's when John Taylor then decides to come to Sweden At that point that training was already something that every firefight in Sweden went.
Speaker 1:It was like widespread. It was a lot curriculum yeah.
Speaker 4:Which year was that 86. 86 is when the colleges were established. And what happened then? It was so John Taylor comes, he goes to the college, northern College which is in Sando, in an island by itself, and he does, you know, he talks to people, they do some burns, they do some burns and it is like the Swiss are doing it. Wow, what's going on here? Because there was never been an intention from Sweden like we're going to export this as a product. We're just doing our stuff.
Speaker 1:We want to protect people and we're talking 86, that's about the time Dreysell puts his first book on Compartment Fire Dynamics.
Speaker 3:I think 83,. I think.
Speaker 1:That's even before first as FBE Handbook. We're talking about the golden era in NIST, in the US, in fire research. But it's hardcore research. It's not necessarily reaching the fire departments right.
Speaker 3:Krista's research was done on a very slim budget. They had a hundred houses to burn. Okay, apparently it was a big textile industry in Sweden before the Chinese invented rayon and synthetic fabrics, so they had a lot of buildings, villages that were basically empty, and so there was a dedicated group of people, mats Rosenda, mark Ostomingos, another one that really had a lot of respect for Krista. He was a very hard man but he was a watcher, you know, watcher source, watcher, gut. So he did a lot of that research and the Swedes are very modest. They don't go around saying, oh, look at us, we're doing something special. And John Taylor actually went over there in a scholarship I think it was 94. I think it was Road Grass.
Speaker 4:Rescue. They came there in the 90s, okay, so this is well established in Sweden by then, okay.
Speaker 3:So John was one of the ones that wrote articles for the IFA and that's what really put me on the map. That's what got me inspired to find out.
Speaker 1:Another time you were in Australia.
Speaker 3:Yes, I joined in 83. And our training back in 83 for fire behavior consisted of six weeks of dragging dry hose and doing hose and coupling drills, another six weeks of doing hose and coupling drills with breathing apparatus and water and then the visit to the air poll refinery where we would fight a range of petrochemical fires. That was our fire behavior training. So virtually we had nothing.
Speaker 1:Right, fast forward to 2023 in Poland. You are here with Szymon. Szymon is organizing the training for the Polish guys. So, szymon, a question to you. This, I guess, is available online. I know there are courses shown as a course. I know there are materials. You wrote a book for Polish firefight. Why are you here today burning a fire in a container, taking your 10 best guys through that container and then sending them to Poland to train? Don't we know that already?
Speaker 2:Okay, so just a comment that I wanted to make before is firefighting is a very practical job, but you are in an environment that is governed by a lot of scientific knowledge.
Speaker 4:Basically the law of suffices. Are they rule here in the Philippines and the US, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2:From the great minds that have been creating this over hundreds of years. You know, like Faraday, we were mentioning the candle experiments or demonstrations. You can explain a lot of things just by burning a candle inside a classroom in a very safe manner. And before mentioned, james Braidwood had a rule that he followed. He didn't only want to make people understand what they have to do, but how and, most importantly, why.
Speaker 1:And we're here talking 19th century Edinburgh.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, yeah, the origins of the first professional fire brigade in Edinburgh. And in the late 90s a lot of Polish people also visited Sweden. But the thing was that what I was able to understand. I entered the fire service in 1999. I was a cadet student until 2004.
Speaker 1:You looked like 27.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know, you know they say smoke preserves, you know, anyway, so I went to the training center and I followed whatever I saw and I didn't question it. You know there was a lot of stupid stuff that we did Unhealthy, unsafe, and it was all because whenever the guys went, they saw some model and they wanted to imitate that, but they were not trained in the pedagogics. Okay, pedagogics, yeah. So what are we actually delivering here? So they just copied a broken telephone game. So, 2010, the era of social media. I'm watching all the guys travel everywhere, the legends.
Speaker 2:Shan already co-authored 3D firefighting with John Macdonald, ed Harten. So John Macdonald, another chap from Australia, ed Harten, a guy from the United States, and Paul Grimwood, a guy from, obviously, uk, and it became a great read for a lot of people because it was finally something that was available in English and from the different countries that speak English. So it already made an impression that it's something quite universal and it was because it translated a lot of what people needed to understand about the fire into the probably, let's say, most popular language. And that was 11 years ago. And they said, yeah, we can come next year. That's 10 years ago. So, first, john and Shan came 10 years ago and then now they're here again. John is currently in Warsaw. We're doing a conference next week that's the beginning of October that we're recording this and they showed us their way of doing things, which they learned in Sweden. And they not only learned, but they understood the model. They enhanced the model to their own needs and then they continued to deliver it with great success.
Speaker 1:Let us jump into the model and let us jump into the exercises. And another reason I've invited you here because you represent the people who inspire instructors, instructors inspire firefighters, firefighters battle fires. So if I understand your mindset, there's a good chance. I understand how you wish to shape the firefighters on all levels and I really would love like if I had to define myself as a scientist. I would love to say about myself that I'm specializing in compartment fires. You know the fire dynamics is something very close to me and you also touch fire dynamics in a very different way and I'm fascinated by the way that you discover it and, in a way, how similar and how different at the same time it is from the way how me and other fire researchers could do the academic side of fire.
Speaker 1:Do that? We come from different backgrounds. You know you guys come from firefight training. You touch this on the ground. You've been burned. You know how it smells. We've been doing combustion, mechanical engineering, civil engineering. We know how building works. We know it from different sides. It all merges, you know, in the flames. So I would love to know how such a training is planned and how actually you try to teach people, this compartment fire behavior.
Speaker 3:So there's some interesting points you raised, and I've got to mention Stephens Vensen yeah, Professor, Stephens Vensen because he was one of the guys that started the IFIW 2008. So we had this crazy idea about bringing together scientists and fire instructors so we could get in the same room and talk about the same stuff and try to build a bridge between the. You know, like it's not a silo, but it was somewhat siloed.
Speaker 1:Of course we are separated, you know Like we're connected by fire, but everything else differs us.
Speaker 1:In a way it's not a perfect environment to share the experiences. However, I know a lot of people. I know a lot of fire engineers. I had on my podcast David Stacey. He's a fire engineer from USA who's a volunteer firefighter and he just says I love to walk into the fire station and talk to the guys and they usually pick up the discussion and they love it. You know, I had Professor Albert Simone who used to be a volunteer firefighter. That's a shared story. There are many of those academics with some firefighting background. It's just you cannot take it for granted. Not every fire engineer has a background.
Speaker 3:On that, Stefan's an example of that. He's also a volunteer firefighter. He's wanted for a long time, so he's got his leg in both camps, so to speak. But he said something interesting to me years ago and I said Stefan, how dumb are firefighters. You know, we know nothing about fire behavior and we've been fighting fires and you know, whereas electricians they go back and they learn about electricity and then they slow everything yeah then they start wiring up houses.
Speaker 3:Well, we just start wiring up houses, you know, we start just going to fires. He said well, don't be too hard on yourself. He said because the first textbook about fire dynamics from a structural fire environment, not an industrial environment, was 1983, duke of Georgetown. And I said that's not right. Goes back to Faraday and you know he says that was industrial combustion. They're trying to work out how to make combustion more efficient for industrial purposes. It wasn't until, hey, the doogal dry style 83 was the first one who said hmm, let's have a look at what's happening in a typical structure fire. So really it's almost a new science for firefighting. The foundation was built on history of well, let's see what this works and what doesn't Were professional firefighting already been going for like a hundred years?
Speaker 1:Yeah?
Speaker 3:at least yeah, but without that foundational scientific knowledge that other professions had. So how do we do it? So we follow in the model of Krista. Really, he was a brilliant man, a very clever man.
Speaker 4:So I cannot confirm this. So I've been told this by my mentor. My mentor was a direct student, Krista. So there's this thing about where's the line between being a genius and a madman. Okay, that's a very thin line. So there is this story. So Krista has this appearance. He will come in, come with like half the shirt outside, with the half of the belly. It was like the students were like what's going on here? You?
Speaker 1:know they look like.
Speaker 4:You know like either that the proper officer we were visiting today, or the professor you know he's looking like this is the mechanic, Just came from having a beer or something. So here's the thing he found out that he need to wash his clothes. Okay, and he's using. He's using some, both electricity to do that at home and time, etc. And he found out like, well, I can put all clothes in his wash. He will put it in a plastic bag that like the garbage, the black ones, the thick ones. He will then put the water then and he will put the washing. I will just tape that and he will put that in the trunk of his car.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 4:So, as he's driving, the clothes are washing, you know that's Krista. Sounds really good, but as much as that is like a funny you know to tell the we used today. We call it the aquarium. I don't know what you call it the bang, the bang, the, whatever it is called which is basically it looks like an aquarium If you put gas and you can show plumber ability to range and you can show a lot of the stuff there. That's his invention, you know.
Speaker 3:Another funny story about Krista. There's a beautiful video. I think I've got a copy of it somewhere. It's very old and he's up the front. He's in the classroom environment, he's got a shirt on and he's got a tie on and he's got a Bunsen burner there and he's showing the combustibility of steel wall and he likes to steal the wall up and his tie catch is fine. So he gets a pair of scissors and he cuts the end of the tie and he's bending over again and his tie catches flyer and gets this. So he reaches home and he cuts it. So by the time he finishes his presentation his tie is about as half as long as it was originally. But he doesn't have to beat, it Just carried on like nothing had ever happened. I wonder, where did he have scissors?
Speaker 2:So just just let me tell you one more thing, because I understood from these guys Manly, and I appreciated that he came up with some of the original concepts that are being used over decades to teach firefighters about basic, yet fundamental principles of firefighting, like flammability range. I made sure, because I was responsible for it in Poland, that it is properly called in the Polish CVT curriculum, signed by the National Fire Chief, that says you are supposed to give students a demonstration of flammability range using Gieselsson's Aquarium.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's our Polish tribute to the gentleman Fantastic, okay, show him. But what about today? What about today's training? What's the point of doing this today?
Speaker 2:Okay, so trying to make a long story short, so I've met Shan. 10 years ago, in the course of things, I started corresponding with Roy because, you know, I noticed that there are critical thinkers and if you wanted to look into the minds of the people who shape the minds of the firefighters, these people are really critical thinkers. They don't take things for granted. They really question themselves, the usual methods. They never say we've always done this this way, and so on. So Roy was one person like that and I guess to become friends there's more than just professional discussions. We also have probably some similar mindsets and so on.
Speaker 2:I think one of the components I can surely say about these guys is modesty. You know they've achieved a lot, they've done great things. Shan just shared that he's been around 30 countries learning, teaching and so on around the world. That's also great opportunities, you know, to create a global network. So we invited Roy over for instructor's workshop just the best guys in Poland five years ago and since we're having an anniversary 10-year anniversary of the first visit of the Australian guys and they set some course of things to happen at the time. And then we continued with the training program, the investment in infrastructure, learning materials and so on. So we've created the system, but definitely I can say that they gave the initial impulse so we were able to go from trying to imitate something monkey see, monkey do, kind of thing. I'm sorry, I'm not trying to offend anyone, but that's exactly what happened and it's the story shared by many countries imitating a model you don't understand by just putting in place things you can visibly see but you're not understanding.
Speaker 2:Why are they squirting pulses into the smoke? Why are they using a, a bottle inside the container? Why are they closing the doors? Opening the doors, what's actually happening? As teachers, we understand that we're driven by some learning objectives. We have to teach them guys, something. So first we identified the catalog of competencies and then we work around this with training programs, infrastructure, tools, techniques, methods and so on. So you know that I've been approximately the same time. I've been gathering a group of engaged people, really involved people, also people with great personal characteristics, modest, hardworking, honest and so on, and so I've created this group. Cfb, tpl, compartment 5 Behavior Training. Just a short side note Roy mentioned it was created in the UK. It's a bit misleading because we're actually structural firefighting, not compartment 5 behavior training, not limited to one compartment. That's one of the problems with the training.
Speaker 4:The term CFB TPL. That's something that the UK created and it just spread. If you talk to a Swedish firefighter, you know what's CFB TPL. They will know, because we don't call, we just say 5 behavior training and they say, oh, structural firefighting.
Speaker 3:I think that's a good point. But if you say, well, we do structural firefighting, well, so does everybody in the world, and so what's the difference? Well, we focus on behavior in a compartment, not lighting really big fires with, you know, six or seven fires and three dummies and pushing people in the front and making men out of them.
Speaker 1:There's some methodology in it.
Speaker 3:The methodology. Yeah, the focus is on fire behavior, and that's the foundation for everything else. If you don't understand fire behavior, there's no point talking about strategies and tactics or an unique advantage. You've got to go back to the basics.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love this because this brings me to the question I wanted to ask. You have limited amount of time and there is infinite amount of fires. I've already learned from my life as a fire engineer that every fire will be different. I had interviews, for example, with Professor Guillem Morijn and Wolfram Jan about the Dalmarlock fires, where they were expecting a certain course of fire and because there was a rug on a chair somewhere, it kind of changed you know the fire behavior there, Like such a tiny detail as a piece of cloth on a piece of furniture, and it made the fire different. So, given that there is infinite amount of ways how fire can develop, how can one train in an infinite amount of time the investigators on what to expect from the fires? How do you approach this variability? Well, basically, it's impossible.
Speaker 3:Okay, so first you have to acknowledge that it's impossible and then you find a way, if you focus on the fundamentals of fire behavior and then you touch on the main variables on how it can behave, that gives you, provides you a foundation, and then that foundation we then build into what I call reading the fire, something that developed in 1999 and it's gone on and been accepted in many parts of the world and it's trying to get a model that helps firefighters to arrive at a critical incident where people having the worst day of their lives, they're losing their property, possibly even their family, and an unbelievable stress. I think it's the most incredible stress that any civilian will ever have to experience and, as an officer in charge of a firefighting appliance, when you arrive at their job, there's an expectation you're going to get off, give orders and things are going to start to improve. So we don't even have seconds. I mean, the truck has just come to a stop, you open the door and there's expectation I'm going to solve all their problems.
Speaker 1:So how do you stop?
Speaker 3:time? Yeah, you can't, it's absolutely impossible. So I developed a system that worked for me. You know I'm not the brightest person on the planet. Under stress we fall back to very, very simplistic models. So I developed this model of smoke, air, heat, flame and you put them in combination, then you've got fire, smoke, air, heat, flame. So if you look at the triangle of fire, you've got oxygen, which is air, you've got smoke, which is your fuel in our case, heat is heat and you put them all together and you've got flame. So I use that as a foundation and I tried to develop a model that would allow me to make rapid decisions on the fire grant.
Speaker 3:When I'd learned all the stuff and I'd applied it 97 to 99 in the training center, went back operationally, I found myself with two shopping lists. I was looking at a fire instead of saying the shopping list for flash over, is this? The shopping list for backchart, is this, what have I got? And it wasn't working for me. It was too complex. So I tried to simplify a system and develop a system that was progressive and that order is for importance Smoke, air, heat and flame and it was logical. It worked for me. I put it out to the rest of the world. People make comments on it and it pretty well stood the test of time. We've added building an environment as the context in front of that.
Speaker 3:So my objective with teaching fire behavior is to give these guys an understanding of the typical fire behavior and the variables. And then we focus on the visual patterns. So if we see certain patterns, it suggests certain things. So the thing is that with reading the fire, it's not black and white, it's not. I saw this. Therefore, this is happening. Most of the indicators are soft indicators so by themselves they have limited value. They're suggesting this stage of development. They're suggesting this is happening when you start to do a 360 and you get more of these visual patterns or a 360. So that's arriving at the front of the fire. So you arrive at the front door and then you go around the building and do a 360, you go around and look at what's happening.
Speaker 3:Yeah, what's happening at the back, what's happening on the inside? And I say it's like a jigsaw puzzle. So imagine that somebody's given you 250 pieces of a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle and they've said I want you to tell me immediately what this is. Well, you could put the pieces together and you start to develop a picture, but you're not sure about it. So as the firefighter arrives, at the alpha side, the front side, we get a few more pieces of the picture and the bravo side. So as we do a 360, we gather a few more pieces of this puzzle and mostly it's soft information. But that's all we have. And they have questions what if you're wrong? You know well, what if I'm wrong?
Speaker 3:So the alternative is just to be a robot. And that's what I was. The first 14 years of my career. I was a robot.
Speaker 3:So what we did, no matter what, you see, you did this because this is the procedure Action and you'd get certain officers. You know, if you're on with this officer, he was going to go case one. This guy would go case two, double back this guy. So they had their favorite approaches and in defense of that, you'll find that those approaches worked, probably 80% of the time, but it didn't work 100% of the time. So that's what you if you if you're wrong, so you have to look at it Things you can do. So you can either just be a robot and do what works most of the time and hope it works all the time, or you can sort of say, no, I'm not going to just go into a robotic, mechanical action, I'm going to pause, I'm going to make an assessment and then I might adjust my tactics based on several pieces of soft information I've gathered and you know what. That's the best we can do.
Speaker 1:So it's also an ongoing thing. It's not just USS. Once you apply the cure and it's done.
Speaker 3:It's exactly. It's dynamic. So when I do my initial arrival and my 360, I get certain pieces of information and I start to form opinions. I think I think this is happening or that's happening. When I look at it a minute later, I might change my mind because I'm seeing something else. I think you know I was wrong. My initial, my initial assessment was wrong. Now I think it's this. But you're always working on soft information. You have seconds, not minutes, to make decisions that affect people's life and death and their property. It's the most difficult job on the planet to do and some people say it's impossible. We tried it but it can't be done. Well, no, it can't be done 100% reliably every time. It's impossible. Anyone who says that if you follow my method, you're going to roll up at a fire, you're going to assess everything's going on and you're going to make the right decisions. But what I hope to do is give firefighters simple models that give them indicators. Some of the indicators are screaming at you. If you understand fire behavior, what's the depth you want?
Speaker 1:to do the reconnaissance at Like. You want to know if it's pre-flash over, post-flash over, or you want to know that the temperature in this room is perhaps at 1000 degrees and the corridor next door is 600. How much you need to know to act efficiently?
Speaker 3:Great question.
Speaker 1:So I think one of the first things you need to know is where the fire is, and this sounds like a stupid statement, yeah, but as an engineer, I would assume you know, like if I call you to my building because I have automation in it, I assume you would know that.
Speaker 4:So this is maybe a topic that will interest your engineering listeners. So if I tell you, well, what do you use to design a building, you're saying well, we use the ISOFIRE, the ZEINFIRE or something like that, the ZEINFIRE that's the same load, the same room, the same size, etc.
Speaker 4:And you use that to design everything. But when you're designing a building I know you've done it you have the plans. You're also making the decisions about what the structure is going to be, the size. You know everything, yeah, so let's look at Sean's example here. So we are arriving at the fire here. We might have the plans, they might be there where the fire alarms and main entrance, you know, but it's not telling you where the fire starts. Well, you might have a detector, but it doesn't. It's not telling you what did it spread? In most cases, not In most cases, sir, you know. And then you know did it wind the break? Not the things that the fire engineer is doing is just trying to prevent you and say, well, if we have this without this, we're going to make this last, for this time, we're going to make the detection.
Speaker 1:In my interview with Sean, I said it already that in most of fire engineers work, you would assume that the moment that firefighters come to the building, my job is done. It's your job now.
Speaker 4:You're saying like so what do you need to know? Because it's like well, I would love to know exactly where the fire is and how it's spreading and what. It's just that we don't have that information.
Speaker 1:So you have to figure out.
Speaker 4:You can use models like that, like Sean has developed in a way we were doing basically, without calling it, that we're basically doing the same in Sweden. You know it's a two genesis of the same thing. You know you develop because you need it and you need to understand. So you need to understand, you need to understand the basics. You need to understand what is fire behavior, what happens, how the fire is behavior If you have access to air. What happens if you lack access to air? What happens if you have lacked access to air and then it gets there? You know there are phenomenons that are there and they're defined scientifically and you need to understand that. But this is the question that an engineer doesn't ask is that? What will I see from the outside if you get to that place at a certain stage in the fire? And that's what Sean is aiming to.
Speaker 3:It's interesting now because we're talking about context, and I'm talking about my context, which is generally most of the fires I'm going to are residential fires. The kids are inside, etc. Etc.
Speaker 1:This is very important because also a lot of fire engineering would be focused on those you know, very expensive big buildings, tall skyscrapers, large industrial buildings, complex buildings, because those are the ones that need fire engineering, where most of the fires that you attend would be residential.
Speaker 3:These are the ones that give me the most grief. If you arrive at a house on fire, there's smoke coming out from several sides and there's no fire showing. They are the crappiest fires on the planet. If I've got a window broken and I've got flames coming out of one of the corners, then I'm happy because I know I've got some place to start. But trying to take it back to a fire engineer's perspective and I'll talk about my experience in fire engineering buildings and the quality of engineering and design in Australia is actually quite good.
Speaker 3:You do get times when you arrive, particularly the smaller industrial complexes, the tilt slabs you don't get a chance to get to the fire alarm panel because it's well involved or it's just not possible to get in. I mean, in a high-rise context you've got a chance to get into the lobby. You've got a fire control room which fire isolated, so you've got all those isolations and that gives you some time. But when you get into a commercial building that doesn't have that, you may not be able to get inside to access the fire alarm panel and get that intel about where exactly the fire is located. It might be beyond your capacity to make entry in there.
Speaker 2:I'd like to just add something on the Shans model. So he's already far away from it In terms of noticing how brilliant it is. We are still appreciating it. So be safe. It's called so this building environment. That's B and smoke air actually air truck heat and flames. So it's we would say in Polish. But safe.
Speaker 3:We say be safe, be safe, be safe.
Speaker 2:So it tells you something.
Speaker 3:It's Australian English.
Speaker 2:What do we want to understand from the first letter B? A building, so what's it made of? Where are the windows, where are the doors? Where's the fire? Or possibly, where's the fire? What's the main use of the building, so what's the time of the day versus the current possibility of people being in there, and so on and so forth. Environment was added recently.
Speaker 2:That's one of the major components. I think it's wind. We saw, not appreciate wind driven fires. I'm really trying to hammer this into the head of Polish firefighters and as so many people around the world are doing this. So smoke. Smoke tells you a lot of things. Well, you cannot be sure about certain things from its color, but you can have some good gases. We call this an educated guess. Exactly, it's not a certainty. It's an educated guess. The velocity of gases, the buoyancy the hotter they are, the faster they go up. That means they're either very hot or very close to the seat of the fire. One of these things, yeah, okay, air truck. Air truck is super important because we know already that what happened in the seventies and eighties in Sweden? That there's a lot of plastics. They burn faster.
Speaker 1:I just recently had Craig Wenschen talking about flow paths and this is very popular.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is interchangeable, so air truck you want to go, do this 360 to understand B building but also air truck, see the smoke and understand what is the air truck now and what is possible, because we cannot predict which window will fail at what point. But we have to. But we are responsible for the safety of both citizens inside that building and the firefighters we are committing to that building. So the possible air truck is one of the major concerns. And then heat. You know how heat acts. Flame is kind of one of the most obvious things.
Speaker 3:It's easy. If you can see flames, you've got a starting point.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, but. But I showed a couple of years ago, I showed at the conference in Olshten that we're going to next week two pictures, you know, fully engulfed windows, full of flames and just smoke issuing from a lot of windows, and I said which one of these you would prefer to fight or which one of these is more dangerous?
Speaker 2:to you, you know, in a way you tend to see it say that more fire, more danger. No, not at all. Not at all. You will not commit firefighters inside a burning inferno. They have to make their way into it. But when it's full of smoke it's actually full of combustible gases.
Speaker 4:So I can actually make the analogy here that my mentor used to then see, who put two buildings and say, well, except, we have a building here, we have a fire, we have full of smoke. We know that smoke contains funnels. And then we have the other one and we have a gas leak there, propane, okay. So which one of these two are it's more danger? We have propane, but it's burning. You know well, he will actually give them the alternative. Would you commit? If we have a leak to propane, I can just get your command no, why am I going?
Speaker 4:Of course you're not. You're not committing people there.
Speaker 4:Basically because if you can stop the leak because it's uncertain. Well, well, if I have a building and I have a leak to propane, you know and I really don't know how much has leaked you know propane has a certain probability range etc. If that ignites, that can happen very slowly or it can have a very explosive. So that means you're not really worried about the flame or the heat explosion. Well, well, this can actually become a dynamic event. You can have structural damage and the body doesn't really tolerate that much. But if you tell the students you know, well, here we have full flame and we have smoke, which was a more fire, more flames, and that's dangerous, it's really not because you will not commit to that fire, but to the fire where the smoke is, which is unburned fuel that does that doesn't have no visibility.
Speaker 4:It's there. You don't really know how much of it is. So you know one of the things.
Speaker 3:I'm most passionate about is educating firefighters about what we call fire.
Speaker 1:I guess that's where we're here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know we've got everyone reasonably understands flash over and back draft. These occur in the room of origin or just outside the room of origin. But what Roy's talking about there was this perceived danger. We've got LPG leak. No way I'm going in there.
Speaker 3:But what firefighters fail to realise is that pyrolysis smoke. So when products are pyrolyzing it's a much lower temperature in the modern plastics as low as 150 to 250. With wood it was 350. So the neighbouring products in that fire compartment are pyrolyzing and that is extremely fuel, rich, unburned hydrocarbons.
Speaker 3:And so the scenario that often, that often quote is you've got a house fire, which is my primary context, but imagine you at the front door and you have to go down a long corridor and the fires up the back, on the left hand side. So when you open the door you encounter a smoke that's not very hot and you think it's not dangerous because something in our brains is hot, black, rich smoke. Danger will Robinson. But it's flows out of that room as it moves down the corridor. It's pre mixing to some extent, so it's cooling. So by the time it gets 10 meters down the corridor it's no longer extremely hot, it's no longer black, it's been diluted and you could probably walk in with a T shirt and shorts on at that environment, and so your perception of danger is zero.
Speaker 3:And the reality is the danger is extreme, because now, not only do you have the unburned fuel from the smoke, like in the smoke layer it's mostly fuel, and below the smoke, most mostly air, it's diffusion. As this stuff rolls down the corridor and through the building, there's a certain level of pre mixing, and when we pre mix fuel, unburned fuel, with air, we can get a burning velocity 10 times greater than a diffusion mixture. And this is what's catching fire for us, this is what's killing our colleagues around the world. Is this lack of understanding that just because the smoke is cold, just because it's gray, that it's safe. It's extremely dangerous. It's more dangerous than the black smoke you can see, and it's just such an area that's lacking an understanding. So you know my passions educate firefighters about fire, gas ignition and the dangers of cumulative smoke in sealing voids or remote areas.
Speaker 1:So I start feeling a bit better what you try to teach those guys in here in your training, because I believe you try to replicate these observations that you just made from years of and years of experiences firefighter into a controlled environment when where you can just repeat this and showcase this.
Speaker 3:So it's difficult to show all of these indicators. So it's been my journey, started 1997 and still continuing today. And everywhere I go I'm picking up more information from people. My quest is to make one of the most complex chemical reactions on the planet, with the enormous number of variables, into something that can be recognized in seconds and responded to. It's impossible, but you know we have to try to be able to do that. So we use different methodologies. We use small scale, we use theory, we use multimedia, we need to use larger scale. And it's still a journey. I know there's so many things that I understand, but passing that knowledge on and I'm always trying to make what's complex more simple so that it can be absorbed it's stuff that's taken me over 20 years to absorb and understand and I've got one week with these guys and I'm trying to pass on what took me 20 years to work out in one week.
Speaker 2:Luckily they all understand a little bit of this already, the instructors.
Speaker 4:If I were to just take what you're saying, sean, and just go one step back, you know the higher to what you're saying. So what's the goal? And I think so I have to go back to Sweden. So what's the goal with the training there? The goal is, like we don't want to train robots, we want five writers.
Speaker 4:So here's the most stupidest of all things. If you ask any firefighter anywhere on the wall, I think most of them, if not all, will tell you have you heard the term no fires like another, like the no fires are the same and at the same times, we want one tool, one procedure, standard places for teachers to do this. We will do everything the same way. You just show me what you do, we will do this, it doesn't matter. So we told him it's just kind of like like double morass today where you're saying, of course, all the fires are different, but we will solve them the same way every time. I don't want to train something. I don't want a firefighter that was just will do what he was trying to do and he will do that all the time. What I want is that someone that comes to a fire assess the situation and then applies the best tactic, the best method for that specific situation, particular fire. So, but there is an issue here that requires what, that requires understanding, and then it requires thinking. So some people like it, some look like it most.
Speaker 4:Well, you know how many times I've heard, you know, I'm talking about water, I'm talking about extinguishing techniques, and they say talking about the bullet, because I'm not talking about the energy, I'm talking about direct, indirect, I'm talking about fire, gas cooling, you know. And the guys say, yeah, it's all nice, and what do I have to do with the nozzle? How long do I have to open it? What cone should I have? And I say, well, what you are asking me is the equivalent of you asking me I'm going to drive from northern Sweden to southern Italy.
Speaker 4:How many degrees do I need to turn the wheel on my car in order to get there? And then I have to ask you know, that's where the famous it depends basic clumps. It's not, it's not. But here's the thing. So I will then say, well, what car or what vehicle are you going to drive? Are you going to drive a tractor or a Lamborghini? What road are you going to drive on? Are you going to drive on payment? Are you going on the highway or just small roads? Are you going on dirt?
Speaker 1:roads.
Speaker 4:Night time, day time, night time what time of the year are you going to drive on the snow? Are you going to drive in the snow? So that makes sense to you, everything on the same, because you don't even question. Of course you will adapt your driving to the road and to the road conditions and stuff like that and the vehicle you're driving. So why is that not controversial in any way? But then I have to tell the students no, you know, just use just open for two seconds in a 45 degree angle and in a 60 degree angle, and that will work.
Speaker 4:I tell you and they'll say well, guys, what are we trying to achieve? Well, if I'm doing gas cooling, well, I want to cool the gases in this room. That's this room, the room we are in now, you know it's just a few meters, so that doesn't take. But if it's 10 by 10 or 20 by 20 or whatever, maybe that, so that changes stuff. So you need to adapt. Oh, they don't like it because that means I cannot give them, I cannot quantify specifically what they need to do.
Speaker 4:They want to become, but they need to understand it, so they can need to adapt.
Speaker 3:They want a simple way to react. It's going to work every time. Yeah, because it's damn stressful. Okay, you arrive and people have no choice.
Speaker 1:I don't think any of us engineers can appreciate the actually the stress component.
Speaker 3:So I spent, you know, the most of my career, 38 years as an officer. And the guy in the front seat and everyone's looking to me the driver, the two guys in the back, the people whose house is burning down they're looking for me to make rapid decisions and it's extremely difficult. And Roy's sort of leading to a bit of a paradox here, isn't he? Because ideally we'd have firefighters. The simplest method is I'm a robot, I do the same thing every time and it probably works 80% of the time. In your context, what we're trying to do is move beyond that robotic approach and we're trying to develop at least officers, at least the decision makers, to be able to take a deep breath and say okay, guys, lay out those lines, get your breathing apparatus ready, don't go inside, but be prepared. I'm going to do an assessment, I'm going to do a 360. It takes about 60 seconds. Well, tell me, can make you sort of say, right, plan A is we're going in through here. We're trying to go beyond one to one tactic and one technique, and it's not easy to do and I think it's a good, there's a good point for simplifying things.
Speaker 3:A great example today was door entry technique. Okay, so we talked about how do we do door entry technique. Well, how do we do it? Well, there's many different opinions about how we do it, so I don't even ask the question how do we do it? I say what do we want to achieve? You were in a hallway. You've got smoke over your head. You don't know what's behind the door. What do we want to achieve? Oh, we want to do this. No, we want to cool the gases, we want to cool the linings, we want to tip everything in a favor. So that's my approach. It's not just sort of say I could have said today okay, guys, this is how you do door entry XYZ and off you go and everything's okay. And a lot of people come, they become robots and some go, some firefighters say it's just too complicated, just tell me what to do. And we're trying to move. We're trying to move beyond that. And we had this wonderful discussion today. We must. It was went on for 45 minutes or an hour.
Speaker 3:CPTPL. It went on for 45 minutes and an hour and I kept. Everyone had different opinions. Should we leave the door open? Should we close the door? Yes, we should know we shouldn't. And I said well, what's the advantages of closing, what's the advantages of opening? And there's pros and cons to all these.
Speaker 4:We were going to a place where this is better than that, and I remember that we have to step in a couple of times and say, well, what if you have this scenario? What you're saying makes sense, but what if you have this other scenario? When you open the door, there's something else happening there. So we come back to this. You need to adapt to the situation, you know. That's the thing.
Speaker 3:You know, I'd love to say, okay, always close the door, Always open the door, set the cone to 38.5 degrees. I'd love to be able to say it's that simple. But it's not that simple.
Speaker 1:So it's like I feel like when there was a fire in Notre Dame Cathedral, donald Trump was tweeting just sends the fire planes.
Speaker 3:Water, water, water, water, water.
Speaker 1:Drop the water on it, it's not going to go wrong.
Speaker 2:Well, actually that was probably the method to fight fires everywhere in the world for some time, just to drown it. But the water damage that you're doing, you know it's like in every place in the world that people are starting actually to look at the hands of the firefighters and question them. It's on trial right now in Poland after the five teen girls died in the what's it called escape room in Poland because the linings were made out of chipboard and they were locked inside. You know, like everybody's on scrutiny the medical, the EMTs, the firefighters, not to mention the owners. What I'd like to say is that, of course, first of all, advertise episode 51, because I already said it on the fire science show.
Speaker 2:Secondly, everybody listening to it has to give a five star review. High five, yeah, five star review on all the platforms that you're listening to, because I'm sure you're having such fun as we are having right now sitting in the school tent room in Gdańsk. But my friends will surely admit and agree that one thing you have to be very knowledgeable in fire science to a degree, of course. But secondly, it takes a lot to become a great teacher. You know that's something else. That's another field that you have to really be great at.
Speaker 2:Yes, open mind, it's modesty. You have to be able to talk to people, interact with them, not create barriers. Engage them into conversation, you know, treat them as professionals and, at the same time, be being modest enough to offer them something that will probably put them on another path in their career, but not to create a barrier between yourself and them and so many other things. That's also something that, for example, if you want to be a great teacher, you have to study it or learn it by doing it or reading about it, but not only. You have to have some personal qualities, characteristics, you know. So there's only so many great teachers around the world and I'm happy to sit with at least two of them in this room when it comes to CFBT, not to mention yourself, You're doing a great job, Wojciech.
Speaker 4:Well, I mean, I'm listening to this, thinking. So you, sean, you have the displeasure to work with me in a couple of times and you have heard my lecture, et cetera. So well, you see, here's the big issue. I'm spoiled. You know, I come from the country that developed a lot of the stuff that's been done around the world. It's put a lot of time and resources into both the educational system, the facilities, and Sweden, I think, is the only country that has a two-year education today for the firefighters. So I have time, and I have that time and I use it and, of course, but more than that, I just want to talk a little about instructor and instructor's courses.
Speaker 4:What I've seen a lot of is you are taken into an instructor's course and then you'll see okay, what's the plan, what are you going to do, what are you going to be presented with, and the instructor may be giving you a deeper knowledge into something, maybe running some exercises where you are the student, et cetera. You're learning that. So this is what my mentor discovered years ago. Was that? That's not enough, because there's a human side of this. So there is what I tell you and what you perceive. That's not necessarily the same thing.
Speaker 1:It's not the same, yeah, pedagogical.
Speaker 4:So you need to understand that people, what I say, what the words I choose, is one thing. You perceive that day, specifically that day. Maybe you didn't have sleep, maybe you're having some issues at home or at work or whatever. It's one thing that two people can hear the same thing, but they can interpret it differently. So that's why repetition and your students.
Speaker 4:So it comes to the point if you're going to teach instructors, you also have to evaluate their instructor ability, their ability to instruct, and I don't see that many places so Sean has that, you know, and some other places that you need to evaluate them. So it's not just deliver them here's the knowledge and go home and teach them and then they don't know what are they teaching, how are they teaching it so? So it's running a course I think it was 2009 in Valencia with a colleague and we were evaluating every single word choice they were doing, how they were presented, not just the context of the actual subject matter, but it's also the way you deliver it. And the students had the first week of that course to compare to where we deliver the knowledge and then they would be delivered by the instructors for the you know. So that's an important part of us as well, because I'm just thinking about what the quality of an instructor should be, but also what the requirements for calling something an instructor course should be.
Speaker 3:I just want to say something about where Poland is now, and I think that I want to make it very clear that it's 2023 and Poland's not starting off on CFPT. These two guys have come over and they're going to tell them how to do it properly. That is not the case. Poland has done something extraordinary. So Shimon has been a fire service leader. He's looked around the world. He's bought various experts over 10 years ago and 10 years ago CFPT wasn't the radar, but he put it on the radar. He introduced us to the right people. We made connections and, you know, through the efforts he made and the networking, we were able to convince the senior management that, hey, we need to go this way.
Speaker 3:What I find absolutely mind-blowing is you've gone from well, what is CFPT 10 years ago to what a year later? You're calling tenders or this most amazing multi-compartment, multi-level dollhouse, as I've learned you call them today. It's a pretty sophisticated dollhouse. I mean, there's a standard prop that was designed by Shimon and it's just amazing. You can do absolutely everything multi-compartment, tactical ventilation, you name it if your imagination's a limit. So this prop was designed. That's been done before Shimon, might you know. It's a very good prop. It may be better than it might not be, but what is absolutely amazing is that became a national model. You see them everywhere and that's the. So that's not. The amazing thing is not to become a national model, but there's 23 of them, 22 of them across the country. So what we've got is this national forest service with a national direction, that, when the space for you and a half has gone from what is CFPT to this mind-blowing practical prop in 22 locations across the country.
Speaker 1:It's not just the prop, it's called system Exactly.
Speaker 3:It's books.
Speaker 3:Exactly the prop. The hardware is useless without software. So what, shimon, he's taken in, he's able to take in information, and not just from me, but other people. He's taken the best of what he's got internationally. And so not only has he developed the hardware, that's only half the battle, probably less than half the battle, mind you. It's pretty impressive. You already need millions to do that, and you have 22 of them across the country. No one has ever done that. I think that's historic. It's never been achieved anywhere. But then to link it up with the software.
Speaker 3:And so here we are, 10 years later. And why am I here? Because I've been doing this for 25 years or more in 28 different countries and et cetera, et cetera. But what I wanted several years ago was to have something more than say come on, shannon Rafele course, it's the best in the world. I wanted to have external validation, so I chose the institution of foreign engineers. Not an easy process. I started in 2017 by 2018, I jumped through all the hoops and I was able to satisfy the requirements of the institution of foreign engineers recognized training course.
Speaker 3:So, basically I'm able to put their logo on it. They value their logo. They don't want to give it to anybody, so that says so. When I guess you're a certificate, if they've been assessed and they've all passed that's a criteria, I give them a certificate with this logo on it. So it's, it's more than me, it's an external validation or an independent organization with credibility that says, yeah, we looked at this, we're confident, we can do that. And I must say that I've trained all over the world and this is the first group. I've thrown some questions, fundamental questions, at people and they get them wrong. This is the first group that has the right answers. So this is like a walk in the park, because I'm trying to trick these guys. I'm saying because there's a certain number of things that are counterintuitive what is YX, mate, what is this? And they always give the wrong answer. These guys are given the right answer every time. They've been trained. So exactly right. So this is just putting.
Speaker 1:This is just putting the icing on the cake. This is great. This is quality assessment of the instructors. Yeah, if your instructors are good, there's a good chance the Chinese will be good.
Speaker 2:So, with all the luck and fortune that I had to meet the right people, probably some of the courage to ask them simple questions that would reveal my ignorance as well in the process, I would like to think that my grandmother taught me modesty my late grandmother. I did a TEDx on that. Modesty got me into CERM. Modesty got me into many places. There's still more. I'm attempting to identify proper people and I'm so fortunate to have these guys over there in the PSP Florian site that we rented for the course that are such great guys. I would say that probably I'm an activist. I have all the kind of things going inside my mind. A lot of them know a lot of things more than I do on many subjects, and then I'm trying to connect them with the network of friends that I have because I care in the long run. I care that we produce firefighters that rescue people from fires and the quality of life is satisfying.
Speaker 3:So we want efficiency and we want to do it safely. It's actually fantastic to work with people to say, professionally minded and focused and prepared to make changes. The interesting thing happened today. We were talking about door entry and I kept asking questions about what do we need to achieve, and they kept telling me how we think we should achieve it. I said, well, I want to know that, I want to know what we need to achieve. Then we got to how can we achieve it? It was a fascinating discussion from one of your students, martin, and he challenged me and I said, well, I'd start here at the door and I'd cool progressively, yeah, and I'm thinking I don't think you're right. But then he started telling me things. I'm thinking, gee, you may be right, so I never stop learning and there's so many things that I think I know really well. And then every day on there, someone challenges me and gets me thinking. So I'm not saying he's right and I'm wrong, but I tell you what he's got me wondering and I want to find out.
Speaker 1:I think I share this with you every day. I'm especially being blessed with the podcast and having these great critical thinkers come here and change my mind. I'm truly blessed learning every day, and that's the journey I try to take the listener with me and with us.
Speaker 3:It's not easy for someone to tell you you're wrong. The trouble is that you have a responsibility. So if what Martin is saying is true, then I need to say consider it and sort of say, right, well, what's the best thing?
Speaker 4:Well, the best.
Speaker 1:Thing for me in the future is to teach. It is right. If I had to summarize like, what do you want from the firefighters? Like what do you want to implant in their heads? It's the ability to critically think and take the best decision, given the information you have, and not be scared to reassess, reevaluate and adjust to the best of your knowledge every time. Challenge everything.
Speaker 3:I think it's a healthy thing to be able to double the challenge, what the traditional teaching is, I think. An example I was doing a tactical ventilation course in Italy and one of my students was from the USA and I gave my talk about negative pressure ventilation. I think I got two slides saying that was originally when we did mechanical ventilation it was negative pressure ventilation. And then we'd worked out it wasn't any good and we went to positive. And this guy said well, hang on, we use negative pressure ventilation a lot, something I think you're wrong, because everything I've ever been taught says you're wrong. Ppv is meant. So I said okay, let's try, let's do an exercise where we do the exercise with PPV and you can lead the negative pressure ventilation one. And I was rather surprised how effective the negative pressure ventilation was. So now I've got to totally rethink my thoughts on negative pressure ventilation because he challenged me and when we put it to the test he showed me that it has some advantages.
Speaker 4:It's the role of the instructors not to be right and just to tell people what to do. I think, without getting too philosophical on this one, the role of the instructor is to convey. I mean, like every other occasion, is to make you think and to make you evaluate, and to teach you how to think and what to evaluate and et cetera. And then you have to get to a point when the students actually I'm very happy when the students are, they know more than me in that topic and they value it. Yeah, but you know, roy, since the course we did this and this, and because I always tell them well, if you go to a course today, this is a lot of stuff is happening all the time. So in five years or in 10 years that might not be correct, and I had discussions with students that way say well, say Roy, but you know we were here at this college 10 years ago or five years ago and I said yeah but what do you work with?
Speaker 4:Well, can you use the knowledge to learn when you started and can you say no, no, no, no, of course the relations have changed and everything. So why are you asking me, then, that things have changed and they have to change because we were learning, otherwise we're not evolving.
Speaker 3:The world is always changing and knowledge is increasing. Another classic example would be the UL research into transitional attack I mean putting water in from outside, survivability. So they did this incredible amount of research mind blowing quality. And before that research coming out, I had this policy well, good, firefighters always attack from the inside. They don't stick hose lines in from outside because that kills people. And that's what I've been teaching all of my life. And then when I sat down and looked at the research they've done, I had to admit that I was wrong, and I've been teaching this for a long time and it's not easy to do. But I wasn't the only one. You know. I think there was almost everybody in the world had the same opinion that external attack put by firefighters the lowest form of firefighting and the real heroes get inside from attack from the unbent portion. But they showed that if you use the right nozzle techniques, you can actually improve conditions and increase survivability for people inside the building.
Speaker 2:And limit exposure to carcinogenic agents.
Speaker 1:Exactly, gentlemen, I feel horrible because I have to stop you. We're like one and a half hour of a one hour podcast, so time for final words.
Speaker 4:Roy. Final words. There is no one technique, there is no one method, there is no one tool. Listen, if they were, someone will be very rich right now, but the problem that I see. So if any firefighters are listening to this, or you know, I hope they are. So there is no one technique. There isn't. What you need to do is you need to have a certain amount of tools, certain methods, because and you need to have the understanding to know when do I use what? That will be my final words on that, Shimon.
Speaker 1:Yours.
Speaker 2:Oh gee, never stop learning. Never be afraid to ask questions. That will get you to meet the most fantastic people in the world that we're having in this room right now, and hopefully you'll be able to also make friends with them. Be modest.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I really welcome people that challenge me, and I think that we're frightened of critics. Criticism is seen as a negative thing. It's not a negative thing, if you are, if Shimon is challenging me because he has an open mind and he really wants to say I don't agree with this. He's got an open mind and he's saying prove to me that you're right. And if I'm prepared to accept him as being genuine, I'm able to ask look at what he's saying and adapt to it. So I think there's a criticism as a negative connotation and it needs to be changed. A true critic is somebody who's open to change. They're challenging you to improve their understanding.
Speaker 3:Once again, my passion is teaching firefighters how to do the impossible arriving at a structure, fire when lives and property are on the line and you have seconds to make decisions. We're not talking minutes, we're talking seconds. When the pump stops rolling and you open that door, the public is expecting you to take action immediately and you don't have enough information to do that. It's a fact. So what you've got to do is start something, do size ups and continually reassess what's going on there, because things do change, and by comparing the initial timeframe of arrival with a minute later and two minutes later, you start to gather more information.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much. Thank you and that's it. Thank you for listening. This episode was really long, so I'm not going to add much besides saying thank you very much, simon, for inviting me, for your very nice workshop. Very happy to meet Sean and Romy. I've learned today a lot about firefighting craft and firefighters mentality and your charisma inspiring interesting. Thanks once again, and for all the listeners, I hope to see you here again next Wednesday. If everything goes well, I'm going to have something really, really nice to share with you. I'm building a research base that's going to be very helpful for especially ones that are just starting their journey in the fire. So look forward for the next week. See you here again. Thank you Bye. This was the Fire Science Show. Thank you for listening and see you soon.