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About the author: Peter Stanley retired from Kent Fire & Rescue Service in
2007, as acting Area Manager Training & Development, responsible for
learning and development for the services two thousand employees. After
retiring he established a training consultancy specialising in developing fire
commanders in incident command and functional command support, which
figures a significant number of UK fire and rescue services amongst its
clients.
After Harrow Court, many UK fire and rescue services reviewed their
standard operating procedures (SOP’s) and introduced much stricter
preplanning requirements as well as prescriptive operational procedural
guidance, which understandably emphasised the requirement for charged
water supply being available before offensive operations commence. This
was a predictable and logical response from services but it has clearly had
the unintentional effect of increasing the time period between discovery
and the appearance of fire fighters in numbers, at height, to undertake fire
and rescue operations. Whilst this approach clearly seeks to ensure fire
fighters are protected as far as possible from risk, it does beg a question.
Have the UK fire and rescue services achieved a satisfactory balance
between delivering the outcomes the public expects in these extreme life
and death situations and the constraints of health and safety legislation?
By this I mean:-
and
ii) Train key fire fighting teams, to a much higher standard in terms of
the chemistry and physics involved in high rise fires, ventilation at height
and in individual risk against gain decision making. They should be
innovative in balancing risk against gain in the fire and search sectors
whilst carrying out rapid deployment rescues and implementing the ‘stay
put’ strategy, in the crucial second risk period before the charging of the
dry riser. The practice of creating ‘safe havens by forcing entry into an
unaffected flat in the corridor on the fire floor, to enable fire fighters to
have somewhere to retreat into in an extreme situation’ Klaeme.B &
Sanders.R (2008) is an example of this type of innovation.
Bibliography:
1. Grimwood. P (2009)’The first five minutes may dictate the next five
hours’ Fire Middle East, Issue 07 Mar/Apr09, Publications International Ltd
2. House of Lords Judgement UKHL 16 (1980)’Bermingham versus
Sher Brothers’[http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKHL/1980/]retrieved
14/07/2009]
3. Klaeme.B & Sanders.R(2008) ‘Structural Firefighting Second
Edition]NFSPA