Breathing Apparatus




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Fire and Breathing Apparatus Training

There is a wonderful scene in John Carpenter's The Thing when the fire alarm goes off and the station personel all saunter out in the corridors, dazed and confused saying "what's that noise?"

In reality as soon as the fire alarm goes off we would all go immediately to the fire point, be assigned tasks and know exactly what we should be doing at all times.

We are not trained to fight fires - if the building is on fire we evacuate but we do learn to use breathing apparatus so that we can enter smoke filled rooms and search for people.

We got taught to use the equipment at Huntingdon Fire Station where they put us in a smoke filled house and we had to find the bodies. It was incredibly disorientating. We had to walk round in pairs with one person touching the wall and the other person holding their shoulder and sweeping for bodies. All good in theory but there were sofas and, TV sets etc in the way.

One group were in a room when the door got closed and they went round in circles a couple of times until they realised.

In the UK you are told that as soon as a fire alarm goes off you have to leave the building immediately not stopping to collect belongings. In Antarctica it's important to leave a burning building but it is also very important to put on as much outdoor clothing as possible. You don't want to escape from a blazing fire only to get frost bite outside.

Me (left), Neil (right) doing fire training at Halley.
I got this picture from the diaries on the BAS website which are well worth reading.

All about burns
The severity of a burn depends on how big it is and how deep it is.

To assess the area that a burn covers you estimate the percentage of skin burnt eg. the palm of the hand is 1%, an arm is 9% and the chest is 18%.

Superficial burns are red like sunburn, partial thickness burns have blisters. Full thickness burns appear dry and leathery. The deeper the burn, the less painful it is because the nerve endings are destroyed.

For first aid you have to cool the skin rapidly, dress the wound and give the patient fluids because burns victims dehydrate.

Last updated 12th July 2006