Hi,

After sending a few messages about structural firefighting, it can be nice to write a presentation.
I'm French, but married with a Brasilian women, so I live in Brasilia.
I start studying structural firefigthing more than 10 years ago, when I was FF in France. As a computer project manager and quality insurrance manager, I was a bit surprised by the low level of answer the FF instructors were able to give me about technical subjet or logical one.

I started by studying and translating document by Paul Grimwood and start to understand a few things.
In 2003, I had the opportunity to put a flashover container in the west of France and after about 60 burns, with a friend of mine, we started to write a course. It was a long time job, but possible, as I took pedagogical course and I'm a great advocate of TWI (Training Within Industry).
At the end of 2003, Paul Grimwood told me to open my own web site to put on line the docs I translated and I opened http://www.flashover.fr in June 2004.
In 2004 and 2005, I wrote a full "flashover course package" and in 2007, I went to Belgium to instruct flashover instructor and put 3 flashover containers in the south part of the country where no real fire training system was existing as this time.
In 2008-2009, the Belgium fire school which was organising the course, received inscription from France, Polland, Switzerland and Brasil. In many cases the candidates were "flashover instructor" disapointed by the fact that the course they have had was not so good and without documentation.

In mid-2008, the Brasilian firefighter who have gone to Belgium to get the course, translated it in Portugues and I went to Brasil to instruct flashover instructor in Brasilia. Now, the course is their official one.
In 2009, I instructed FF from Lisbonne (Portugal) who now use also the course as their official one.
In France, I instructed large fire service in the south of the country, and other use part of the course I've made.

In 2010, I faced a big problem: the course is updated as instructors and other FF give information, ideas and so on. But in order to let the instructor get the course, we use Internet. But unfortunalty, flahsover.fr is only in french. So, with other guys, we decided to open http://www.tantad.com which is in fact the international and pedagogical side of flashover.fr
The docs are available in French, Portugues, Spanish, English and Italian.
Notice you can see, on http://www.tantad.com many pictures from the instructor courses.

Tantad is a no-proft ogranisation and we can give help to build flashover container at very (very!) low price (a doc explaining how to do that is avaible on Tantad web site), and instruct instructors which them can instruct as many FF as they want. The course is of about 150 pages of pedagogical documents. Actually we have instructors in Brasil, Portugal, Switzerland, Polland France and Belgium. On 2010 and 2011, we will go to Italy, Argentina and Peru, and maybe in Canada.

We have know a "translation team" and a "redaction team" and the new version of the cours (V. 3.00) will be release in a few weeks.

Ah, a detail: my wife is high rank FF officier and she's beautifull. :-)

Best regards
Pierre-Louis