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December 04, 2006
A dangerous occupation ....
It was really only a matter of time before something like this happened. The fire in the fireworks warehouse in East Sussex serves to highlight the folly of the government's assault on the fire services and the drive to socially engineer, reduce and "demilitarise" the fire services. In reality the target was the Fire Brigades Union, the last bastion of the Socialist Workers Party within the Labour Party fold. The victims, as all too often in any fight between politicians are the people who actually do the work.
The Chief Fire Officer of this particular Fire and Rescue Service has been one of those at the forefront of the drive to fill all "management" roles above the level of the people who ride on the big red lorries, with "managers" parachuted in from Tesco, the local Job Centre and anywhere but the ranks of those who know anything at all about the job that they are called upon to do. The result has been that they have had to re-employ retired officers to fill the knowledge and experience gap they have created, appointing these ex-officers - sorry, "managers" - as "Operational Support" or "Incident Support" officers. The idea being that they stand beside the Parachutist "Incident Manager", who has no fire or operational experience, and make sure he follows their "advice" and doesn't screw the job up completely!
The supreme irony has to be that one of the two casualties, is one of these "Incident Support" officers, a man who, having done his time and been put out to grass by his "modernising managers" had been hired back to "help" their proteges gain the experience they will never be able to amass because they will never, in a million years, ever be competent to tackle a major incident unsupported. Worse, they will never understand what it is like to be at the sharp end, take orders from someone who does not understand and has never experienced for themselves what it is like "at the sharp end". Sadly, I suspect that these deaths are only the first of many more we will see until the politicians are made to accept the blame for their destruction of a service which, with some faults it has to be said, was by and large pretty good.
Incidents involving explosives are mercifully rare, and few of us ever have the chance to experience dealing with them - thankfully! The incident commander has to understand the likely behaviour of these materials in a fire, for, while they may burn if unconfined, the behaviour is likely to change dramaitically as the burning rate increases as the temperature in the building rises and as the expanding gas increases pressure on the remaining material. The fire tends to increase in speed, flashing from subsonic to supersonic and the resultant detonation can occur with very little warning and very, very swiftly. The standard procedure is to place large water streams at the access points and throw water at it from a long way away. But, that is not always advisable - especially with fireworks as they contain things like magnesium and other metals, which increase their burning rate if you add water! All of this will have had to be taken into account by the Incident Adviser - but at the same time, the fire fighters will have been aware that there were other exposed risks around the building on fire which needed to be protected, and they will have recognised the need to attempt to prevent the fire spreading to involve other fire works. This is a damned if you do, and damned if you don't scenario, every experienced fire officers nightmare, one the inexperienced ex-Tesco Manager would not even begin to understand no matter how often he or she had played video games on the Minerva Suite in London or elsewhere.
I mourn for my lost comrades. I pray for their families - and I hope that those that have "modernised" the fire and rescue service to the state it is now in are exposed for the frauds they are.
Posted by The Gray Monk at December 4, 2006 01:00 PM
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