2 drills for better understanding how you breathe when wearing an SCBA

QUICK DRILLS
Know Your Consumption Rate
2 drills for better understanding how you breathe when wearing an SCBA

By Homer Robertson

How often do you conduct SCBA drills? Even if you went through an SCBA drill on your last shift or on your last drill night, it’s time to have another one. You just can’t emphasize enough how important this one piece of equipment is to the health and safety of every firefighter. Regardless of your level of experience or training, there’s just no way to master the SCBA without a continuous effort and a personal commitment to improvement.

There’s no shortage of SCBA drills you can organize and present to your crewmembers. Don’t get in the same old rut by just blacking out the facepiece and crawling around the apparatus bay. A good starting point is to review past firefighter fatalities or near misses that involve SCBAs or air management. These incidents will provide great information that may help you prevent the same mistakes from happening in your own department. Look at Web sites such as FirefighterCloseCalls.com, NIOSH and the National Fire Fighter Near-Miss Reporting System for current information.

And get out of the classroom, too. Although sound classroom training is just as important with the SCBA as it is with all fire service subjects, the hands-on approach is a must for SCBA training. In this article, I’ll focus mainly on consumption drills. But first, let’s review a few basics.

Knowing exactly how long your bottle will last is critical; you can only determine this by regularly drilling on air management. Photo Susan Corbin



SCBA Checks
We talk a lot about our operational readiness. If there’s one piece of equipment that has a direct impact on our personal safety, it’s our SCBA. Most career departments have their personnel check their SCBA at the start of each shift. This is not a task that should be delegated to the apparatus operator or another member of the company. Your life depends on how well that unit functions, so it should be your job to check it and maintain it.

Volunteer companies should have a similar system that provides for routine checks and procedures for getting the units back in service after use.

Teaching point: We sometimes take for granted the very simplest things, like our daily or weekly SCBA checks. The little things like a full bottle of air and the supply hose connected to the bottle ensure we get off on the right foot. Train each crewmember to perform the check the same way, and if possible, use a standardized check sheet.

Consumption Drills

One of the most misunderstood concepts about SCBA use concerns the different bottle sizes and the amount of air that each size will provide. All firefighters must understand the amount of working time they’ll get off each size bottle. The most common sizes are routinely called 30-minute, 45-minute, and 1-hour bottles. This can be very misleading when determining actual working times.

There are a lot of factors that determine working times and members must be aware of them before being introduced into a hostile environment. Consumption drills are the best way to determine how long a specific bottle will last for you.

When planning your consumption drill, try to replicate conditions that you’d find on the fireground by having members wear full PPE and SCBA. The drill should involve some method of increasing members’ heart rate and exertion level as if they were involved in a real fire.

Consumption drills don’t have to be tedious, either. Keep it fun. I’ve seen departments play basketball and broom ball while wearing SCBAs as a way of increasing cardio levels and tracking consumption rates.
A note on safety: Before starting, be sure to monitor each member’s pulse and blood pressure. Conduct a basic pre- and post-drill medical evaluation to obtain information on the fitness level of your crewmembers and identify any warning signs.

Here’s what a consumption drill might look like:
1. Perform baseline medical evaluations of all members involved in the drill, including pulse and blood pressure.
2. Instruct all participants to don full PPE and SCBA.
3. Record the amount of air in the SCBA bottle of each participant and their starting times.
4. Run each participant through a high-energy, cardio-intensive activity, such as a mask confidence course. Or, allow them to play a team sport such as basketball (still in PPE).
5. When each member’s low-air alarm activates, have them stop the drill and record the time. Continue until all members’ low-air alarms have stopped or the member stops performing the required task (out of air or is no longer capable of continuing).
6. Calculate the actual working times (how many minutes per bottle each member can expect to get) and provide them to each member.

Last-Breath Drills
Although there are many great SCBA drills that can be used to determine consumption rates and improve the user’s confidence with their SCBA, a drill that I think every SCBA user should perform when learning the basics (and then every year as a refresher) is to breathe a bottle all the way down to nothing. This drill is a firefighter survival skill that everyone should experience.

If you’ve worn an air pack, you’ve probably had your low-air alarm activate. But have you ever had to breathe that very last breath of air from the tank? If not, you need to. That last breath has a huge impact on your mental process, even during a training exercise in a non-hostile environment.

The breathing apparatus also has a very unique sound and feel to it when pulling down that last breath of air. Each brand of SCBA will have a different feel to it, so take the time to know your brand of SCBA.

Here’s what a last-breath drill might look like:
1. You can start by using fresh bottles, but I recommend using the depleted bottles from the consumption drill.
2. Let each member continue to breathe the bottle down until the member cannot get any more air. At this point, have them remove their masks to breathe normally.
3. Demonstrate the emergency procedures for running out of air or experiencing a mask malfunction.
4. Discuss with each member how the SCBA feels and sounds when reaching that last breath of air.

A Final Word
Our lives depend on that air we carry on our backs and the skills we develop using this most important piece of equipment. You can’t train too much or be too good with your SCBA.

Captain Homer Robertson has been involved in the fire service since 1978, starting as a volunteer with the Granbury (Texas) Fire Department, of which he is a life member. He has served with the Fort Worth Fire Department since 1985 and is currently in charge of the fire equipment division, which includes the apparatus fleet.

Copyright © Elsevier Inc., a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Comment by Rusty Mancini on December 3, 2009 at 3:36pm
FETC, When I read that section on the basketball scenario I was thinking, damn It's a challenge trying to keep an eye on our guys performing RIT training, much less a basketball game. Safety our priority when performing our rotations! Talk--- about taking a blind side hit while dribbling, I could here our insurance rep now, you were doing what??? Well the captain did call it a foul, sir--!
Comment by FETC on December 3, 2009 at 12:09pm
OK, I feel I must interject my opinion about this article and would like to caution the author of this national article, that suggesting the use of high energy sports like basketball to simulate our bodies response to firefighting stressors while wearing PPE/SCBA is a combination for personal injury. I have seen this suggested and done in the past, most ending in ambulance transports; un-necessary workmen's comp injury claims and loss work time. Most firefighters even though they may pass a physical, are not fit enough for "intense" cardio workouts, not to mention our muscle skeletal parts are not ready for rapid starts, stops, jumps and rotations while carrying an extra 75-100 lbs. Professional basketball players don't even practice in this INTENSE capacity.

The function of training is to provide a learning environment that is highly controlled to provide the student or brother less of a chance of suffering a career ending injury or death. Asking a candidate to perform at this intensity while unfit or in a recent poor health condition, (sick or under the weather) adds additional complications to the mix.

The firefighter combat course for example is job specific tasks with cardio in between stations, thus mimicing the actions of a firefighters job at peak performance demands. None of the which that offer the liability of firefighters crashing into each other because an overzealous brother wants to win at a team sport training session.

This also reduces the "trainers" liability of trying to define and quantify the reasoning of why they were playing basketball in PPE and SCBA to their chief, the insurance company or lawyer(S) when the claim is denied..... (hmmmm ding, ding, ding - lawsuit) When someone asks where in the firefighters job description, does it state he or she would be subject to the conditions set forth in the training evolution?

TCSS
FETC
Comment by Rusty Mancini on December 3, 2009 at 9:01am
lutan, I recently had our members training on RIT and implemented air management along with it. I was calculating each members air usage, and I too was amazed at the results! I ran this training twice just to see if there was any change and to my surprise, some were different and there were some that didn't change at all.

It definitely gave me a understanding on who I can assign to be on a RIT team.
Comment by lutan1 on December 2, 2009 at 7:48pm
I ran a drill a while to work out how many litres of air per minute were actually being consumed (given we generally calculate the durations on 40 lpm) and was amazed that soem were consuming as high as 75 lpm and some as low as 30lpm, even when working under stress.

Very interesting to do....

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