Wider remit for fire engineering qualifications

IN THE May journal’s International President’s Desk, Charles Chu asks whether we in the Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE) should ‘try to delineate functions and responsibilities to be discharged by qualified fire engineers, technicians or professionals in other disciplines?’ He goes on to ask whether we think it is ‘practicable to develop a registration scheme for professionals with various backgrounds to meet different demands in different regions?’

To both these questions, I can only ask ‘why not?’ The IFE has much that it can contribute to the international fire and rescue service as a whole.

All parts of international fire and rescue service organisations are now involving civilian support staff and specialists who, themselves, are often highly qualified in their own fields, but who are highly experienced in the fire engineering, fire safety and building construction fields in which the fire engineers per se are qualified.

I have thought for some time now that there may be a need to consider a new type of engineer in the form of an ‘applied fire engineer’. This would be similar to an applied mathematician, who applies mathematics to real-life engineering problems, and is halfway between a pure mathematician and a scientist like a physicist. In our own environment, one could consider the applied fire engineer as a sort of ‘intellectual fire mechanic’, while the true fire engineer is more of the theoretician, and the fire safety engineer is, I think, a fire safety design engineer.

The applied fire engineer may also be in a better position to consider the problems of ‘disaster avoidance engineering’, which is, I would surmise, an engineering field beyond that of fire safety engineering normally applied to new building projects.

To return to Charles Chu’s original question, there are a number of areas where I think the IFE and the associated professional organisations can explore a wider remit for qualifications. A few rather diverse qualifications that could be considered might be:

• additional certification for specialists – such as oil fire engineering or wildfire engineering

• special degrees or National Vocational Qualifications for less theoretical fire engineering routes, such as for an applied fire engineer or a fire physicist (analysing fires, disasters and incidents as entities themselves)

• fire and rescue service documentation engineer (for example, a technical author with CPD hours, fire and rescue service experience, and appropriate fire engineering subject certificates) who could advise on documentation structure, content and archiving methods that are appropriate to the fire and rescue service community

I feel that this sort of diversified approach to fire engineering would, at one and the same time, widen the audience for its discussions, papers and training courses, and would subsequently enable it to increase its membership.

Andrew Slack
IFE Student Member

Forest fires and carbon calculations

HAVING STUDIED the article by Gail Wells entitled Climate connection in the April issue, I wish to make the following point. Invoking the calculations in the boxed area of p.43 of the article, Gail expresses the possibility that the forests of the world might become a net source rather than sink for carbon dioxide. She might be correct in this conclusion, but appears to have omitted one key quantity: the ability in quantitative terms of vegetation to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Roughly speaking, a fully grown tree absorbs a tonne of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in 40 years. In the calculation referred to, we are told that 1,852kg (1.852 tonne) of carbon dioxide are released in a fire over a 10,000m2 area. Such a quantity could be absorbed by 1,000 unaffected trees in the area over which the carbon dioxide is distributed after the fire, in a time of the order of three to four weeks, which is likely to be much smaller than the average time between fires.

The calculation, using the information given above, is a simple one which an interested reader can easily confirm. It can be repeated on the totally reasonable basis that the dispersed carbon dioxide will encounter more than 1,000 unaffected trees, the time for its removal being correspondingly shorter and a smaller fraction of the time between fires.

Gail Wells herself will no doubt advise on how best this factor fits into the scheme of her calculations and on whether it calls for a reconsideration of the assertion that the forests of the world could become a net source of carbon dioxide. She might want to consider the speed of regrowth of vegetation after a forest fire and/or intentional planting of trees.

J C Jones FIFireE
University of Aberdeen

Health issues and firefighting foams

According to a Sydney Morning Herald report on 13 May, there is to be a national enquiry into the incidence of cancer among firefighters in Australia. This follows a ‘cancer cluster’ (an area with higher than expected cases of cancer in a given period) among firefighters at Atherton Fire Station in North Queensland.

Firefighters have breathing masks when they deal with the poisonous fumes given off by burning plastic at incidents, but there are concerns about the ingredients of firefighting foam. Some foams, such as perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), contain toxic fluoride chemicals. This foam polluted groundwater around the site of the Buncefield explosion in Hemel Hempstead, England, two years ago.

UK officials are concerned about PFOS, which does not break down in the environment. Instead, it accumulates in organisms and works its way up the food chain, where it can become a serious problem. Following an Environment Agency report on PFOS, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs wants to phase it out.

Even if replacement foams are used, the ingredients need to be investigated for harmful effects on health and environment. It is now admitted that many chemicals were allowed into common usage without proper safety testing, which is why the European Union's REACH scheme plans to safety test thousands of chemicals.

In my view, firefighting foam should be part of the investigation into the Queensland cancer cluster to find out if the foams and chemicals could be a possible cause. I hope the Australian investigation will help protect firefighters’ health in the future.

A Wills