By RAUL A. ANGULO
Tools, equipment, and technology advancements to help keep firefighters situationally oriented on the fireground were a prevalent theme at FDIC International 2018 in the exhibit hall.
Firefighters become lost and disoriented enough times that numerous inventors—many of them active firefighters—are developing ideas to address this problem and make the fireground safer for firefighters. Though new technology advancements may seem complicated, the thought process behind the solutions remains simple: How do we keep firefighters from getting lost, separated, or disoriented?
According to Don Abbott’s Project Mayday, a firefighter becoming lost or disoriented is one of the top three reasons to transmit a Mayday. In the period from January 2006 to December 2015, 115 firefighters in the United States lost their lives from being caught, trapped, lost, or disoriented within burning buildings. Firefighters becoming disoriented is not unique to America; it’s also an international problem. The International Forum to Advance First Responder Innovation (January 2017), comprised of the European Commission and 13 countries including the United States, identified what it called Capability Gap 1: The ability to know the location of responders and their proximity to risks and hazards in real time. Much like the intent of our 16 Life Safety Initiatives, the Response Technology Objective (RTO) was to develop an indoor (above and below ground) responder geolocation system.
Developing the System
The Pathfinder Search and Rescue Way-Finder System, patented by Martin Patrick Trainor, assistant chief officer with the Cavan County Fire Service just outside Dublin, Ireland, and Paddy O’Boyle, director of business development at Dublin City University, addresses this objective. Working with a team of professors at Dublin City University, Trainor and O’Boyle anticipate their system will go into production in early 2019.
The system is a sort of virtual electronic “search rope” that uses a “breadcrumb” concept to assist firefighters in keeping oriented during interior firefighting and search operations where visibility may be limited or near zero because of heavy smoke conditions. It also helps prevent firefighters from becoming lost, disoriented, or separated from their crews when they exit the building under the same conditions. The system also allows a rapid intervention team (RIT) to locate a down firefighter much more quickly—a huge advancement in rescue technology.
The unit, about the size of a small smoke detector, is called a “puck.” It uses smart technology to track the movement of firefighters within a building. Unlike global positioning satellite technology, which cannot penetrate inside buildings, this smart technology can pierce through buildings and basements and isn’t affected by heights, so it can be used in high-rise firefighting operations. The puck uses a special adhesive that sticks to just about anything in a fire environment (photo 1). As firefighters enter the building for fire attack or search and rescue, they follow their standard search patterns, but instead of using a search rope to tie off at specific intervals—which is time-consuming because tying knots with gloves on in a dark, smoky environment slows down the search team (photo 2)—they slap a puck onto a wall or an object and keep going. As the search team advances farther into the building, they can place another unit at any interval they deem strategic. Un