Robert Moore, Division Director of the Emergency Training Services Institute at TEEX, tells Chris Beck about the challenges of training fire-fighters around the world for industrial disasters What sort of industrial training do TEEX offer? TEEX offers training in all aspects of emergency response to include Industrial response. All of our courses comply with NFPA Standards and most are Proboard certified. The most popular industrial training we are currently doing on the firefighting side is NFPA 1081 certification – interior, exterior and leadership training. We also offer customised industrial training to meet the core objectives of our clients may be. Often large companies with facilities spread worldwide request to do a large corporate school, bringing employees from all of their facilities to College Station, Texas Brayton Fire Field. During these schools we customise the training to meet their needs. Just as Industrial response is different than municipal response, so is the aspect of training for both. During my career I have worked in both arenas and the response to each has its own unique challenges and must be handled differently. Both types of response has a primary Life Safety concern. Typically with an Industrial event in a plant or factory setting you have a better accountability for the area involved. Also both types need a good strategy and tactical planning before any fire-fighting takes place but with Industrial response comes the concern of what type of chemicals or material may be involved. If you are an Industrial plant brigade most of the time you will already have this information through preplans. If you do not have this information you will need to approach it more on a defensive mode and as the information comes in to command start moving to an offense mode. What are the main risks that you prepare your students for? Our goal is to prepare our students to face any situation they may come across with Life Safety being the most important. At Brayton Field we have the most realistic industrial burn props in the world replicating process units that you would find in refining and chemical operations. All of our industrial props are designed by our Industrial staff who have worked in the industry and have responded to all of these types of events. Since there is a difference in response techniques and terminology between an industrial response and a municipal response, we have chosen to have our Instructors teaching each to come from that industry or Fire Department. This allows us to make the training as realistic as possible and teach our students proper strategy and tactics for each. We make sure the student gets the type of training they are coming to TEEX for. How important is realistic hands-on training for fire-fighters? It’s crucial that you not only get the classroom portion of the training, but also quality hands-on training as well. If students can see, for example, the way water patterns can be used to protect themselves and equipment from flame impingement, or how foam operations work and how to deal with pressure fires versus atmospheric types, that can only help reinforce the message they had heard in the classroom and help them better understand their life safety responsibilities. What range of industrial situations do you cater for? Our primary Industrial training is based on the petrochemical and refinery industries. Companies like Exxon Mobil, BP and Shell are our largest client base. We train them in response to process fires, transportation emergencies, hazardous materials response, rescue operations, storage tank fires, and emergency medical response. How do you teach your students to be aware of the risks of fire on top of the fire-fighting techniques? We teach our students pre-planning, where we send them to a tank farm, for example, and plan what type of fire scenario could arise. We then put together a pre-plan that can be implemented should that situation happen. Doing that increases the safety for the fire-fighters, meaning they already know what equipment is likely to be available in the area, what sort of fire situation – pressure, gas, liquid and so on – may arise, what sorts of chemicals they may be dealing with. This allows them to choose the best personal protective equipment to ensure their own safety, work out how many members of the public or staff may be in an area and in need of rescue, and who is accountable for what. How do you ensure that the equipment that you use is as modern and up-to-date as possible? We work with our numerous vendors, who help us with supplying the most up-to-date tools for our fire-fighters to use in the training field. We make sure that the equipment is true-to-life and unaltered and give the students the chance to try different types of the same tool. We don’t typically recommend one particular brand or manufacturer, but we would recommend different types. For example, if we have a new type of foam eductor, we may encourage our students to work with it and look at vendors who produce products like it. How have you seen the techniques that are taught change over the years, and do you think standards of training globally are as high as they should be? Techniques do evolve. We learn through trial and era. The best place to learn is on the training ground and not an emergency scene. We allow our students to try different techniques and make mistakes to learn from. In terms of training around the world, the more industrialised countries tend to be a bit further ahead of the curve as far as adopting new techniques and equipment is concerned. We do training all over the world, not just here in Texas. We are in 58 different countries, dealing with our students and offering training in all four corners of the globe, and take the most up-to-date techniques and equipment with us to our students, wherever they may be. We have what we call Cooperative Learning

Mikael Westerlund, CTO of Savox Communications, explains how industrial disasters pose unique and numerous challenges for search & rescue teams and fire brigades alike Deploying to scenes of devastation following earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes and getting a search started at the earliest possible time is the typical stuff of USAR (Urban Search and Rescue) team work and equipment deployment. Where fire plays a part in structural failure and building collapse, however, it’s not always possible for USAR teams to get started until the fire services have a situation under control. Scene setting – Bosley Mill Disaster On Friday July 17 2015, just after 0900hrs, an explosion at the Wood Treatment Limited wood mill in Bosley, Cheshire, UK, resulted in a major fire and structural collapse incident. Some 15 fire appliances were on the scene by 1030hrs by which time it was known that two explosions had taken place and four wood mill employees were missing, presumed trapped. The cause of the explosion was the ignition of wood dust, or ‘flour’, produced at the plant to make wood-laminate flooring; also present were quantities of heating oil, kerosene, acetylene and asbestos adding to the combustibles and dangerous chemicals on site. When materials such as grain or wood are handled in an industrial scenario the creation of dust is inevitable. When that dust is confined in an enclosed space with a good source of oxygen in the air, the only thing missing to create a dust explosion is a spark or ignition source. This might come in the form of static build-up due to a storm front, or an unnoticed mechanical malfunction of a piece of equipment causing a spark or heat build-up. Exactly what the source was in Bosley on that first morning is unclear, but the Cheshire Fire Brigade described as ‘fully developed’, fires in several areas of the site from the outset. It was also ascertained early in the chaos that a four-storey building had collapsed among the devastation. With the prospect of further explosions the fire services had to proceed with extreme caution, the main method of fighting the fires being the use of water. As the fire crews tackled the fire and first injured were transferred to hospital, (some 35 people suffered injuries of varying severity), three regional USAR teams were called on by late morning to attend the scene. By 1800hrs it was clear that the ‘large multi-agency team’ that was now gathered, including USAR teams from Merseyside and Lancashire, would have to remain at least over the weekend. Both these teams were equipped with a number of Searchcam 3000s and LD3-4 Delsar life detection systems from Savox Communications, which were used on many occasions throughout the incident. The Cheshire Fire Brigade continued pouring huge quantities of water on the fires, including the silos containing wood flour that was still burning and stated on that first day that its crews were ‘working tirelessly to ensure that search and rescue teams could safely access the site’ as soon as possible to search for those missing. By 0730hrs on July 18, almost 24 hours after the first explosion, the specialist USAR teams began initial assessments. Shortly after, the county’s search dog, Bryn, and his handler began work, with other search dogs joining later. By lunchtime, SAR efforts were well underway, the manual work involved in finding those missing aided as much as possible by the use of the Savox search and rescue cameras as well as the life-detection systems. The following day, demolition and specialist heavy lifting gear were used to clear a path to the search area at the centre of the site for the USAR teams. During the night, USAR teams had discovered a body in one of two key areas that had been identified as ‘of interest’ by Bryn. USAR efforts continued through the 20th alongside the fire-fighters who were continuing to cool the site, though with the number of fire crews now reduced to five. With the reality of the situation apparent, USAR teams went from search and rescue to search and recovery mode. By lunchtime on July 21 a second body had been found. At 1630hrs that day it was announced that work within a collapsed structure on the site had begun though dark, humid and smoky conditions inside were more challenging than ever. After three of the silos were removed on July 22 this enabled further search and recovery work on July 23 in an area that had been focused on by search dogs early on. On the morning of July 27, a fresh USAR team from West Yorkshire arrived on site to replace the crews from Lancashire who, like their Merseyside counterparts, had attended since the start. The Merseyside USAR group remained and continued working with the West Yorkshire team. A full two weeks after the incident began on July 31, the USAR teams were still working 24/7 to locate the missing, while fire-fighters continued to monitor and cool the site. USAR teams remained onsite throughout August. Equipment deployed – fire impact With the devastation and dangerous chaos at Bosley, the use of dogs at an early stage was essential and proved exacting in locating two of the victims later; trained SAR dogs, like Bryn, are responsible for a many victim-location SAR successes. Also deployed at Bosley, however, were technical search tools, including Delsar seismic/acoustic life-detection equipment and SearchCam 3000 telescopic cameras. Both these were used in combination during the SAR phase. Once the recovery phase had begun, however, the SearchCam 3000 stood alone in the ongoing search for the missing. Using the life-detector system in the SAR phase it was, of course, hoped to locate live victims in the rubble pile, with the seismic sensors designed for attaching to beams, or girders, or other surface on which they can detect any sound vibrations generated by a victim. They can also be pushed firmly into the ground using a screw-in spike, with magnetic attachments also able to attach the sensors to

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