Ola Johansson, CEO of the SRTC, speaks to International Fire Buyer about the Cold War history of the Centre, and their plans to expand globally
Could you please give us a brief history of your training centre? How has it developed over time?
We began in 1983 as a defence training ground, originally operating as a Governmental training facility until 1986. Hasslum, currently the training grounds of SRTC, has been a military and civil training area since the middle of the 1950s. In 1986, the operations moved to a new agency called The Swedish Rescue Service Agency (SRSA). It had four training centres nationwide: Revinge, Skövde, Rosersberg and Sandö. Since then it has been operated at the Governmental training school for Swedish and International training within the area of risk and safety. Development of the Hasslum training centre in Skövde and the training courses aimed at rescue personnel, fire-fighters, Fire Chiefs and international organisations among others, continued until 2008.
In early 2001 we saw a huge transformation regarding the structure of training facilities in Sweden. The Government began a large investigation concerning the numbers of training organisations in place for such Government training. The number of training facilities and also the future of the bases was based on the Cold War structure during that time, in the 80s and 90s. That is why we originally had a four school structure.
The investigation about the number of schools lasted a year. In 2007, the Government decided on a new investigation about the structure of the schools. It was decided that two training schools would be owned by the Government and the remaining two would be either closed or run as private companies.
In 2008, the school here was leaving Governmental ownership, as was the school in Stockholm. At the same time, there was also a reorganisation at the Swedish risk and creative management level. They created a new agency called the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency or MSB.
The Swedish Rescue Service Agency, the Swedish Board of Physiological Defence and the Swedish Emergency Management Agency were all discontinued in 2008 and so were the training centres in Skövde and Rosersberg.
The operations in Skövde, Hasslum, then became privately-owned and the development of rescue and safety training on the Hasslum training ground continued under the new name of Swedish Rescue Training Centre.
What services do you offer? What range of fire, rescue and HAZMAT courses do you offer?
We offer pretty much everything within risk and safety. We have continued providing the same courses we did as a Government school, only now we do so as a private company. We have been certified by the Swedish Government to continue the training we did before within the fire, rescue and HAZMAT control training curriculum.
What we can also now include, as a private company, is our experience in consulting and operational knowledge gained from having one of the largest training facilities in the world for over 25 years.
We help our customers to implement training facilities in their home countries, advising them on the structures of schools and the training needed for staff, technicians and trainers and company guidance systems.
The other thing we offer is training systems. We offer complete system packages for our customers. We started to build the container system that is widely recognised today in the late 80s. If someone wants to buy a fire training container system we can deliver it to them, together with the training and also the maintenance concept – the market package as well.
What does your Situation Awareness Training involve? Why do you think SAT training is so important?
The main focus we have here at the facility is live agent training or real training. This means that if we are carrying out HAZMAT training for example, we don’t only use cold smoke or steam generators, we train with real HAZMAT. I believe we are the only facility in the world able to carry out such training, on such a large scale, as a private company.
Similarly, if we conduct ammonia training we will do it with real toxic ammonia in a realistic environment. It’s the same case with our fire training; if we conduct indoor fire training then we will do it with real fire. As a fire-fighter you have to be able to distinguish between fire types by looking at the colour of smoke, to determine fire behaviour sequences and so on. This knowledge is all developed through fighting real fires.
Can you tell us about your simulators and the equipment you use during training?
Many other companies around the world have copied our containers from the early 90s. The difference between their containers and ours is that they use computer guidance and electronic guidance and so on. In our containers it’s the opposite way round, because our containers will work in the middle of the desert and in the middle of the jungle, or at the North Pole – anywhere in the world. Our safety is built in at the construction stage – that’s the big difference.
What makes your training grounds so unique? What facilities do you offer at the grounds?
We started to build the grounds in the early 80s and by today, anything you would find outside of a training ground is found here too – we have shops, hotels, hospitals, bars. Anything that students would possibly need, we aim to cater to.
How do your courses attract international customers?
We have a lot of fixed courses. We have 45 fixed courses in our catalogue. That’s the main thing we’re doing. 25-30% of what we do here is courses from the catalogue. We customise all the courses to meet the customers’ demands or the problems that the customer is having. It could be Fire Brigades or Police Departments; we have military customers, we have corporate customers. We sit them down and identify what kind of problems they’re having and what kind of training they’re looking for.
The other thing that we have started introducing is training with chemical warfare agents. That’s also connected to HAZMAT training. We’ve introduced this because of the ever-increasing need for counter terrorism measures. Companies and organisations like to have some sort of training in case of a chemical warfare incident or terrorist act.
We also provide the situational awareness safety training run by former colleagues of mine in the Special Forces. They show you how to act outside in a hostile environment. For example, we had a large Swedish Telecoms company here to do training, because they were about to go to Nigeria to install telecoms systems. Because of the range of threats they could face they decided to carry out safety training at our facilities before they went. Our hope is to be seen as a one stop shop when it comes to risk and safety training.
Can you tell us about some of your current worldwide projects?
At the moment we are carrying out a lot of activity in the Middle East because we understand the need there. Also in Eastern Africa we get quite a lot of requests coming in and we have some interesting projects about to start up over there. We are also in China, where we’re helping them create their own training facilities. We are doing the same in South Korea.
What plans do you have for the future?
We are hoping to set up an office or a hub in the Middle East in the near future. That’s a very important thing for us.
