NATURAL GAS CALLS

What do you do when you get on scene of a natural gas call. My dept gets there.........sniffs the air........says,''Yeah, Its gas, call the gas co. Heres your bill". What do they expect the fire department to do???? They dont understand the hassle of responding to something that theres nothing we cant do anything about. What do you all do??

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Permalink Reply by Ben Waller on February 28, 2009 at 2:05pm

Sorry for the dyslexia...

That should have read "falsely high CO readings and falsely low Oxygen readings".

The problem is that with the motor running, you may have some level of exhaust gasses in the cab. If you start the meter in the cab while responding, then it will assume that the air in the cab is clean when that may not in fact be the case. Even properly operating vehicles can have some level of CO in the cab, regardless of how good your mechanic is.

Do you even have a window slightly cracked while responding? If so, other vehicles' exhaust gases can contaminate the cab of your vehicle.

You can get a low oxygen reading just by having the crew breathing in the cab with the windows up, especially in the winter if the heat is on 'recirculate' instead of getting fresh air through the vents. If you're in traffic with the heat or A/C pulling in fresh air, you can be increasing the toxin level and reducing the oxygen level.

These problems may not be enough to put the monitor into alarm, but it will give you a false baseline on your clean-air cal, because the vehicle cab with the motor running is not the same thing as ambient fresh air.

Zeroing in the station can give you false start-up readings as well, because fire stations are notorious for having CO readings higher than the ambient air outside the station.

The best way to get an accurate clean-air cal at the scene is to take the meter away from all operating vehicles and upwind of the scene, then start it and run a clean-air calibration.
That way, you know that you're not getting any potential toxins or interferents that can give you a false baseline cal.