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ARFF: Adapting Structural Techniques
Quick background:--Training--
At the airport every month we have a list of things to train on. Every month we have to adapt some techinque from structual firefighting to crash rescue (arff). This month is "Water Shuttle".
--Equiptment--
We have 3 crash units each carrying 3000g of water for a total of 9000 gallons. There are 8 hydrants on our airfield we can use to get water from. And the city has agreed to let me borrow the services of one of their "Super Tankers" which holds 4500g of water and has a portable dump tank and a small pump on it.
Now before I got on with the airport I was a volunteer with a rural department and we ran water shuttles all the time. so I'll be teaching the 2 day, 2hrs long class. ive got a video from FETN about water shuttles that last about 15mins, I've got passages from the 5th edition essentials I can read from for about 10mins, I can talk about how we ran our water shuttles at my old department for about 20-35mins. So this will take up about an hr of the class alotted time. Then I was going to bring em outside and show how the dump tank is setup, how the tanker dumps its water, how our trucks draft from these tanks, and how the tanker refills at the hydrant and comes back to dump its water again. I figured this process could take up to an hr to demonstrate.
The thing is, I'm not sure how to "Adapt" this to ARFF since 1.we dont have dump tanks 2.we carry plenty of water and 3.we would never use a water shuttle ops, we would easily call MA if we couldnt handle our issue which would almost never happen.
Any ideas or advice on how I could teach this class to actually "Adapt" the technique as opposed to just teaching how a water shuttle ops is performed?
I appreciate any advice.
-Logue
At the airport every month we have a list of things to train on. Every month we have to adapt some techinque from structual firefighting to crash rescue (arff). This month is "Water Shuttle".
--Equiptment--
We have 3 crash units each carrying 3000g of water for a total of 9000 gallons. There are 8 hydrants on our airfield we can use to get water from. And the city has agreed to let me borrow the services of one of their "Super Tankers" which holds 4500g of water and has a portable dump tank and a small pump on it.
Now before I got on with the airport I was a volunteer with a rural department and we ran water shuttles all the time. so I'll be teaching the 2 day, 2hrs long class. ive got a video from FETN about water shuttles that last about 15mins, I've got passages from the 5th edition essentials I can read from for about 10mins, I can talk about how we ran our water shuttles at my old department for about 20-35mins. So this will take up about an hr of the class alotted time. Then I was going to bring em outside and show how the dump tank is setup, how the tanker dumps its water, how our trucks draft from these tanks, and how the tanker refills at the hydrant and comes back to dump its water again. I figured this process could take up to an hr to demonstrate.
The thing is, I'm not sure how to "Adapt" this to ARFF since 1.we dont have dump tanks 2.we carry plenty of water and 3.we would never use a water shuttle ops, we would easily call MA if we couldnt handle our issue which would almost never happen.
Any ideas or advice on how I could teach this class to actually "Adapt" the technique as opposed to just teaching how a water shuttle ops is performed?
I appreciate any advice.
-Logue
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Truckie Jay on
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Never say "We would never use a water shuttle."
What would happen if you had a crash and lose of power at the same time? Lose of power to the pumps leave only head pressure in the hydrant system if you have water towers. How far away is the towers supplying the airport? What kind of pressure would you have IF power was out?
How about a natural disaster? Would you be called MA to assist? Why not add water shuttle to the list of things your dept can provide?
What about chemical industries? Is there a large chemical manufacturer or industry in your area where a major incident could occur? On these types of incidents would your dept be called MA for your foam? If the incident was large enough and you ran out of foam what else could your dept offer? Water shuttle prehaps???
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Permalink Reply by paul michael komandt on
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Try to teach how to fill your Crash trucks without the use of the hydrants. Bring in an Engine and fill the crash trucks and have them return to the location.
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Permalink Reply by John F. Woodard, Sr. on
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One thing you may want to check is the ability of Tankers to keep up with the discharge rate of the ARFF equipent.
I was on Crash Rescue and we nvited the local paid FD to hook into a hydrant and feed us.
We specifically opened the main turret on High Flow and the structural engine could not keep up with the discharge rate. E went to low flow and they had the ability to keep up
Retired Capt
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Permalink Reply by DUST on
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A 747 carries close to 50,000 gals. of Jet A. If one crashes on take off and is even close to full your gonna need every bit of water you can get coming to you from mutual aid. Your guys will be too busy fighting fire, with rescue, and triage to go back to the hydrants for water. You'll need your mutual aid departments to come to the scene out on the field. Your guys will need to know how to get mutual aid dept. trucks water into your trucks with and without drop tanks. Setting up drop tanks can be time consuming in itself especially the older ones which are more like setting up a tent. Do you use 5" hose? If not you'll have to teach the ARFF guys how to best use it. Also 1 FF will need to be in charge of Water Supply in the command structure. Swap out FFs in that role and see how they do. Will your pump out perform your water supply? Try laying hose from different parts back to the hydrant and see how much time that takes verses having water come to you etc....I've read others that have posted some good advice on here for you. So Good luck!
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Once again it all depends on what type of aircraft your airport services. What class of airport are you. i truely believe that a dump set up can move more water if done properly. We always haul water to our fires and when properly set up and exicuted can flow over 1500 gallons. My airport recently didi the same thing with our entire county water shuttle association. We were able to keep our Striker flowing with both turrets. We were hauling with a 1 mile round trip with two engines filling tankers.
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Permalink Reply by FETC on
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Jonathan
I am Assistant Chief at an Index-C ARFF Department. Why would you train shuttling water with porta-tanks when we have the luxury of laying LDH from one of those (8) hydrants located on the AOA?
In our case, we have three ARFF trucks as well. The first three engines (mutual aid) from the city, would come directly to the incident site and pump off their water supply directly into an assigned crash truck. This would get each crash truck 2 loads of finished foam. The water supply officer would then dictate from which hydrant the LDH would be established from. If it was a remote location, couple thousand feet away, we would ultimately lay one LDH supply line to a crash truck using the appropriate number of inline relay pumpers.
Another thought is water shuttles create unique safety hazards of their own, with alot of traffic and moving vehicles. Plus with these types of aircraft incidents we tend to have another side that most residential house fires do not have and that is an MCI. This alone requires alot of planning with a ton of EMS ambulances and ambulance travel routes, etc. I have personally never seen both a water shuttle and EMS - MCI operations work properly with all that travel traffic and one usually suffers....
If it was closer to a hydrant, then multiple lines would be laid to supply multiple crash trucks. Things to remember is the Jet fuel burns off fairly quickly, faster than most any mutual aid department can respond to an airport, get access onto the AOA with the post 9-11 security, set up a pumper for loading and a porta tank with another pumper for drafting from the dump tank(s) and then ultimately fill crash trucks with hand jacked LDH while you have 5-6-10 tankers trying to keep up with the pumping demands. Three crash trucks flowing just the roof turrets and no others, are going to be flowing 3,600 gallons a minute. Last time I shuttled water for a residential fire, it was NO where near that figure for an ISO rating...
To answer your last question: the FAA requires you to train on adapting structural equipment. The use of hose, nozzles, appliances, adapters, pumpers, tankers, and yes even porta-tanks is covered under the FAA Advisory Circular 5210-17A. As well as all the tools and other rescue equipment in a mutual aid engine. Why, because most crash trucks are operator only and fairly stripped without much tools, equipment, and water supply fittings, etc.
Take Care and Stay Safe
Bill
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Permalink Reply by Paul Montpetit on
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I learned a very long time ago to never say "never" in the Fire service and that you never have "enough" water....Set a scenario in that something went wrong...maybe your MA companies are out on another call....or storms have knocked out power....You can and should know how to set a portable pond...how to draft from it...how trucks can keep it full...How maybe a "super tanker" can be used to "nurse" the tank while smaller tankers run the shuttles....Or maybe even using an engine at or near a hydrant as a relay to keep water coming in to your primary apparatus....the possibilities are endless......and it might even teach people a thing or two.....Stay safe...Keep the faith.........Paul
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Permalink Reply by Jonathan on
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Bill,
We're a class C aswell. Our airport isn't one with large passenger aircraft. We are mainly used for the military to train their pilots, and Northrop Grumman is located here working on the AirForce's E8-C that does a lot of test flights and constantly flying in and out. We've got a few civilian planes housed here that fly from time to time. But we rarely get large passenger aircraft here.
When it comes to LDH, we have 50' of 5" on 2 of our crash units, and one 25' section of hard suction on the 3rd truck. Everything else is 1.75",2.5", and 3". The plan is usually setup for all 3 trucks to run on the call, the initial 2 start attacking and the 3rd is used to nurse whichever truck has deployed an attack line. once the other unit has consumed all of its water, it heads to a hydrant to refill. It takes our trucks roughly 2.5mins to refill from a hydrant using 2 3" lines connected to a 5"gated-wye.
We are also in the predicament to where we dont have near enough hose to lay from a hydrant to somewhere on the runway. The closest hydrant is just too far away unless the plane would crash near a hydrant.
It would make more sense for us to call in MA for a tanker and an engine. Have the engine setup at the nearest hydrant and fill the tanker up and have it shuttle back and forth to the crash units refilling as needed. But I don't believe it would be able to keep up with the roof turrent, although the attack lines would be adequate.
The main training is to be on how a water shuttle operates, and how to do suction with our trucks. But to truly adapt the water shuttle operation is what I wish to achieve.
Its been a terribly long day and I'm not quite sure I'm stating all that needs to be said. Falling asleep at my desk reading the posts actually. I'll check back in the morning and hopefully give a better response and have a better understanding of everyone's posts.
-Logue, thanks for all the responses
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Logue
Sounds like that shuttle would work for you then. The size of your aircraft are smaller and you usually dont have the MCI issue. We have 737, 757, AirBus 319/320/321's and alot of CRJ's (about 90 commercial flights daily) not counting any private or corporate jet traffic.
We use automatic mutual aid and rely on them for water supply and manpower. We tone them dependant upon the size and number of passengers. They more often are here before the aircraft and this provides us with unlimited 5" supply line. We get a 3-2-1 response from the city and a 1st alarm from the town. So in respect to tanker shuttles, it can be done, in our perfect scenario with desiring a non-stop water supply we are laying alot of 5" to the scene with M/A.
Nursing the crash truck with a large tanker and then shuttling water will work, just need to figure out the cycle time for what you can actually expect for sustainable gpm.
FETC
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I actually got to teach how to do a water shuttle. When our trucks were destroyed in the fire the City let us borrow 2 pumper/tankers and 1 tender. Since I was the more experienced on structural trucks I showed them how to run it, and taught how to draft and pump to another truck and the basics of a water shuttle. Go figure when you think we'd never use a water shuttle, we were in a situation where we needed to know how to do one because we would be doing it in the event of an emergency.
-Logue
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