Washington State and British Columbia Wildfires Info for August 21st, 2015

There are a few large wildfires affecting the area I live close to so I thought I would post a few links to some informative sites.  The fires I am referring to are around Grand Forks, British Columbia and Stevens County, WA;

Esri fire mapping; http://www.esri.com/services/disaster-response/wildlandfire/latest-news-map

Public Meeting held August 20th about the wildfires close to Grand Forks

Ferry County Sheriff's Office Facebook Page

BC Wildfire News

Wildland Firefighter courses available online; http://www.nfaonline.dhs.gov/

Stickpin Wildfire Mappingsupport; 

Washington State Department of Transportation Road Closures

DriveBC road conditions and events

Treewell safety

I recently got back from a ski trip and thought I would post some information regarding tree well safety when skiing. 

If you don't know what a treewell is or how to be safe around them - then you should read this;
www.deepsnowsafety.org

An informative video on a treewell rescue is here;

















Maybe an avalung could help prevent....

Be safe!

Firefighting Technology using Drones?

I finally got my latest techno gadget and am about to learn the fine art of flying it. Yep, got myself a drone (aka quadcopter).
Since, I figu5re I am going to crash it a few times, I just got a cheap model to learn the art of flying it. Sometime later I may upgrade
to a one of the more robust versions. Oh well, the one I got has a camera on it.

So how can a drone aid in firefighting? I don't really know, but I guess if you can imagine something big on fire, like a refinery or paint factory or something, it may come in handy for identifying some extreme hazards before an engine company gets too close.

Check out what Detroit Fire has recently done with one of their drones;

Check out this article on how drones may aid fighting fires in Australia;
http://news.sky.com/story/1162844/drones-may-help-fight-bushfires-in-australia

If you want a drone for yourself, just go to Amazon and order one.  You might want
to specify the delivery method!

B.C. Ambulance Electronic Patient Records

I recently blogged about the future of epcr (electronic patient records).   (old post)

Since that time I have become aware that the B.C. Ambulance service actually does epcr.
See the news release here; BCAS News Release

Car Fires, Batteries, Hybrid vehicles, etc.

I was doing a little bit of reading recently and came across some research recently done by the NFPA regarding car fires.  How many times have you gone to a car fire and not immediately chocked the tires of the burning/incapacited vehicle?  (Hopefully none).  Anyway, after reading this research on hybrid vehicles, you may want to make chocking the tires the first thing you do at every scene - fire or mvi.

Here are the current links to the NFPA research;
Part1, Part2, Part3, Part 4
Part5

If you have attention deficit disorder or otherwise find reading 20+ megs of research papers a bit boring you may want to just find the key points like I did;
Read Part1 and compare the Current Vehicle ICE Fire Tactics on page 18 to the Current EDV Fire Tactics on page 20.

The NFPA Hybrid Vehicle extraction guide is shown in this video;  http://youtu.be/CtgaLTeoH-4

Vehicle Patient Extraction Training Aid

In our neck of the woods, motor vehicle accidents in the winter on our  mountain roads are a regular occurrence during snowfalls.   In fact, just as I was about to create this blog post, the tone went off, and we had a callout to a three vehicle mvi.   A patient from one of the vehicles needed to be extracted with the jaws of life.

Anyway, I came across a training aid that would be beneficial for any department who has to respond to a lot of mvi's.  It is called the Sweet Extraction Training System from S&S Medical products.  You can read all about on their website here.

Check out this video of the product; http://youtu.be/3eNot5J-DFA

Rescues of the week

You never know when all that vertical rope rescue practice you have been doing may be needed. 

Some bridge repairs and a car accident resulted in a trained vertical rope rescue firefighter having to do a pickoff in order to save a person.  Check out this video for details; Firefighter saves life with rope rescue



A large fire also trapped a crane operator.  A helicopter had to rescue the man.