Station 1902

[00:13] Ed Mann: Welcome to another Providence station, 1902 podcast. I'm your host, Ed Mann, director of training and education. Today I have the privilege of speaking with our special guest from Europe, Lena Hopkinson and Carl Batchelor, to discuss a wide array of topics. I want our listeners to have a better understanding of the differences and the similarities between the fire services. Lena and Carl, welcome to the show, Lena. Please take a few minutes to introduce yourself to our listeners and please correct me on the pronunciation of your last name so our listeners have a better understanding of how to pronounce your last name.

[00:55] Lena Hakansson: Thank you, Ed. My name is Liana Ho Kansom from Sweden, where I live working at Kolkat Systems in Kungspaka. I began my firefighting journey actually as a part time firefighter in ure, which is a small village in the middle of Sweden. And I quickly grew into this companionship of where you have your brothers and sisters within the crew. And I wanted more, but it wasn't an option to be a full time firefighter. In Auras is that organization is built on part time firefighters. And this, well, it led me to explore further opportunities and I sort of discovered the fire protection engineering program. After graduating as a fire protection engineer, I spent some years being a consultant within risk and fire. And today I work at Cold cut systems in method and training where I can connect more direct to the fire and firefighters, understanding problem areas and it lets me explore how to solve different.

[02:16] Ed Mann: Problems and to our listeners. We'll get more into the cold cut systems here a little later in the podcast. Carl, introduce yourself to our listeners.

[02:27] Carl Batchelor: Yeah, thanks, Ed. My name is Carl Batchelor. I was a whole time firefighter in the UK for 32 years. I joined in September 1984. So nearly 40 years ago this month I joined West Midlands fire Service, which is the second biggest fire service in the UK. Purely hold time. We have no volunteers or retains, so it's purely whole time service. I joined in 1984, as I said, and I spent probably 17 years as a firefighter at a really busy station. I think at the time when I joined we were doing between five and 6000 calls a year, which is, which was a lot then. Places aren't that busy now. We had a mixture of urban, industrial, commercial, fast roads, slow roads, you name it, we had it on our patch. It was a great, great patch to learn your trade, if you like. Probably after about 1516 years I decided to go for promotion and then started working my way up through the ranks. But I did also spend a significant amount of time in training and I found a real passion for training, specifically SCBA training, or BA, as we call it in the UK, fire behaviour and tactical ventilation. And I probably spent about seven years in our training department in West Midlands Fire service, ultimately heading up that department with a team of nine or ten staff working under me, delivering SCBA training throughout the whole of the West Midlands and the wider region. When I retired in 2016, after a 32 year career, I started to do some work at the. We have a international fire service training college in the Cotswolds in the, in the UK, in England. We have delegates there from literally all over the world. And I spent, in fact, I still do some work there now. So I've spent some time working there now, delivering SCBA training, ventilation training, fire behavior training, and recruit training, so training new recruits how to be firefighters. I started working for Colcott systems probably about four years ago on a more ad hoc basis, and more recently, probably two to three years ago on a more permanent basis as a tactical firefighting advisor. Now, that means I'm just going to use my expertise and my experience in fire behaviour, ventilation and SCBA, and about how that fits in with some of the exercises and scenarios and demonstrations we do, both in England, Europe and further afield. So that's me at the moment, really. And here we are today.

[05:03] Ed Mann: Okay, great. Well, both of you have a very wide range of expertise and background. So, Lena, during my research for this podcast, I found that Sweden has 5300 paid firefighters, 11,000 volunteer firefighters that became part of the swedish civil contingencies Agency on January 1, 2009. Prior to 2009, the fire service was part of the Swedish Rescue Service Agency. Can you briefly walk our listeners through that structure and what it meant for the swedish fire service?

[05:43] Lena Hakansson: A large portion of swedish firefighters are not volunteers, but they are, as I was, a part time firefighter, so they are paid, so not fully volunteer. We have, or they have a schedule where they have their own duty one week a month, approximately. It depends on the organization, but that structure has been since the eighties, so it's for about 40 years now. And it is a way to complement the full time firefighters in smaller areas where it's difficult to get a full time station because of the amount of alarms, it's not enough to have a full time. So you have firefighters on call, so to say. And, well, it's an extremely important role for the swedish organization. We. I would say we rely on our part time firefighters since, as you said, it's more than half of the, half of the firefighters in Sweden are part time firefighters. And it means that you have full time job as your main job, and then you get. You're on call for one week, a month saying that you need to be. When the alarm goes off, you need to be at the station within five minutes. And that depends on the organization. But roughly five minutes until the first car is on the way.

[07:13] Ed Mann: So farl that would be similar to the retained firefighters in the UK, correct?

[07:19] Carl Batchelor: Absolutely. Absolutely correct. So currently in the UK, we got about 31,000 all time firefighters. So 31,000 firefighters, two thirds of which are whole time, and the other sort of approximately 10,000 are retained or RDS retrained retained duty system.

[07:39] Ed Mann: Okay, so, Selena, when the move was made to the swedish civil contingencies agency, was that done to kind of centralize the fire service with what I might refer to maybe in the US as the Federal Emergency Management Agency?

[07:59] Lena Hakansson: Oh, I don't know if that's the same thing, but I know that what happened when. When the swedish civil contingency Agency was. Became a thing that was to centralize sort of the training and. Okay, yeah, well, yeah. How we looked upon stuff in Sweden.

[08:18] Ed Mann: Yeah.

[08:18] Lena Hakansson: I can't find the word.

[08:21] Ed Mann: Yeah, well, so it's kind of similar to the makeup of the british fire service as well. It's centralized. There's. There's. There are national standards. There's one agency that's creating the standards for the entire. All of the fire service in Sweden, much like it is in the UK.

[08:42] Lena Hakansson: Yeah.

[08:44] Ed Mann: Right.

[08:46] Lena Hakansson: Yep.

[08:47] Ed Mann: And if they tried that here in the US, there would probably be riots on the streets. So. So, Lena, I think you explained this a couple minutes ago. So a part time firefighter in Sweden is basically, it's a paid position and you're required to, say, work one week a month, and you're paid while you're on standby. Or when you respond to calls, you're.

[09:16] Lena Hakansson: Paid while you're on standby. So you do your. Your original work. Your main job is you still do that because there could be weeks where you had no alarms, but then again, there could be weeks when you. All you did was go to alarms.

[09:29] Ed Mann: Okay, so, Lena, when you got started as a part time firefighter, what was your entry level fire training? What did it consist of?

[09:38] Lena Hakansson: By that time, it was up to each organization to arrange the training. So we had certain standards that should be fulfilled, of course. But I had two weeks of BA training, so to say, so that I would do, like, learn the basics of doing BA attacks and. Yeah, well, basic fire development instructions, really. And then you got your training on the go. And it was Mondays when we switch teams. Then you had a longer or bigger training with the crew that went on or went off, and then we had full day of trainings once or twice a year.

[10:22] Ed Mann: Okay, so how does the current day entry level training compare to what it was when you became a part time firefighter? Has it changed?

[10:32] Lena Hakansson: Yeah, I'm not fully informed about that, but I know that it's a up to the. As you mentioned before, the Swedish, the civil contingencies agency, it's up to their standard now and they have the training. And so I believe that it's a more standardized and ensures that all the becoming firefighters have like the equivalent knowledge and regardless of where in Sweden you will be working. So I really believe that it's a bit better nowadays.

[11:05] Ed Mann: Okay, great. Carl? I served at RF Alchembarry in Cambridgeshire from 1990 to 94. Became good friends with Mike Kane, who was a training officer for the Huntington fire Brigade. So I'm somewhat familiar with the fire service in England. However, for our listeners, please explain the structure of the fire service in England.

[11:28] Carl Batchelor: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm going to go a little bit broader than England. I'm going to go UK. So the United Kingdom.

[11:33] Ed Mann: Great.

[11:34] Carl Batchelor: So in the United Kingdom, we have 52 different fire and rescue services, and obviously the UK encompasses Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and all of those are split into about twelve different regions. So Wales would be a region, Scotland would be a region. And then, for example, we have West Midlands, the northeast, the southeast, various different regions throughout the United Kingdom. Each one of those fire services, those 52 fire and rescue services, will be looked after by either the fire and rescue authority or the police and crime commissioner. So that authority or the police and crime commissioner will then appoint a chief fire officer to run that fire service for them, that fire brigade, on their behalf, and they will then report to the authority or the crime commissioner. Those chief fire officers have a group called the NFCC, that's the National Fire Chiefs Council. So that's where all 52 regional chief fire officers will sit on and agree on national standards and national way forward. So we have, for example, the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004, which sort of dictates how we build a fire service, what we need to do with regard to prevention, protection, training, our response models. We have some more recently published national operational guidance. So that's the guidance around how we would deal with specific incidents, for example, how we deal with backdraft, flashover, road traffic collision, train crash, wildland fire, flooding. Now, the only issue there is, it's exactly what it says on the team, it's guidance. So it's not mandatory that each fire and rescue service has to do exactly what it says in the guidance. That guidance is provided as an overall framework for each farm rescue authority to build their own individual guidance upon. There will be regional differences, because there are regional differences within risks as well. But generally, people will comply with what's in the NOG, the national operational guidance. So we do try and stay as a UK fire service to a certain extent, but there are big differences, for example, between some of the things they do in Scotland, in West Mids, in London, just because of the build up of the areas. You know, whether you're highly popular, your population's high, or your population's low, the different risk areas. So there will be a different. A different way of looking at things in each region.

[14:11] Ed Mann: But the bottom line is there is a minimum standard that's been created for the national fire Service.

[14:18] Carl Batchelor: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so really? So if I transfer from my, where I was in West Midlands, if I transfer to London or the northeast, or even Scotland and Northern Ireland, there'll be some subtle differences, but no major differences for me to be able to understand.

[14:35] Ed Mann: Okay. And just, just for you and Lena. So, you know, I live in central Pennsylvania. I could go from one fire station 5 miles apart in two different municipalities, and there could be major differences in the minimum standard to become a firefighter at each one of those stations.

[14:56] Carl Batchelor: Okay, wow.

[14:59] Ed Mann: Just so you know what we're, you know what? We're comparing the us fire service to what has taken place in Europe over the years as far as national standards and national requirements. So, Carl, what's the minimum requirement for an individual to become a firefighter in the UK?

[15:22] Carl Batchelor: So, this is interesting, because when I joined, when the world was in black and white, it was very different to what it is now. We had minimum height, we had minimum chest expansion. There were lots of rules in place that aren't there now. So currently, now, as of 2024, you just need to be 18 years old with a good level of fitness. You then fill in an expression of interest, which was followed by an application form. You would then do some psychrometric testing and physical testing to make sure you're the right character and have the right level of fitness. You then do specific tests. For example, a ladder, climb a ladder, lift a casualty, drag, some working in enclosed space to make sure you're not claustrophobic, you'll have to do something. Assembling and disassembling a piece of equipment just to show that you can use your hands in the right way. You'll do some equipment carry to show you're physically fit for the job. You'll then have an interview, then a medical background check, and then you'll enroll on the training course, which typically is somewhere between twelve to 16 weeks. Some organisations, for example, my old organization, West Midlands Fire Service, we did all our training internally, so we would run the training courses from West Mids, where I worked at the fire service college down in the Cotswolds. We ran an apprenticeship out of there, so we would have a civilian turn up on day one. And after an eight week intensive course, we would send them back to their own organization. Then with a almost a safe to ride tickets that have started on their two year apprenticeship program. They then would become a qualified firefighter after that two year period. But typically it's somewhere between eight and 16 weeks. Eight weeks being the absolute minimum, is the actual full time training course. So two to three weeks of that would be breathing apparatus, one week would be road traffic collision, one week might be first aid, not quite paramedic level, but nearly paramedic level again, depending on which fire and rescue services, obviously, loudness, pumps, all the usual sort of rudimentary stuff. And then you'd have, as I said before, you'd have a probation period where you'd get rudimentary exams and practical tests, probably up to and including the two year period, whether you then become a fully fledged, full time, old time firefighter. The retained gene system is slightly differently. They do probably a two to four week course, focusing purely on core skills. So that's a safe to ride ticket, so they can ride the fire appliance, heavily supervised, because obviously these people have also full time jobs, so similar to the swedish model, and then they get released on evenings and weekends whenever they give their availability, and they're on a pager on call to respond to an incident. So the amount of time they have for training is significantly less than if they were to be a full time firefighter. So their recruit course typically is much shorter than the old time course.

[18:24] Ed Mann: Okay, so for your, your full time firefighters is similar to the fire academies, if you will, that our career fire departments in the United States use could run anywhere from eight to 16 weeks, depending on the fire department or what their, what their requirements are. The volunteer side of our business in the US, that's completely different. So just for our listeners, explain what a retained firefighter is in the UK.

[19:00] Carl Batchelor: So retained firefighter or on call firefighter they referred to by birthdays so on call or retain retained duty system. So typically. So we'll go back to my service, because I knew it. West villains fire service. We were purely whole time London fire brigade purely whole times. We're talking about two very, very busy fire rescue services, quite densely populated areas. If you look at then somewhere like part of Wales or parts the southwest coast, Devon and Cornwall, where the population is much more sparse, we have less people, we have less risk. Therefore we can't justify having whole time fire stations with people staffing those fire stations 24/7 so those, those fire stations there are what we call a retained fire station. So people, and I think, I don't know the timing exactly. I think it's either ten or 15 minutes. People will have to either live or work within an area of ten to 15 minutes from the fire station, and their pager will go off when they're, when they're on call, and they will then get to the fire station. And as soon as four or five people get there, they can then mobilize on the fire appliance to whatever incident they've been turned out to. And they have to provide a minimum cover of so many evenings per week or so many weekend days, I'm not sure what that is. And they do training typically once a week. They'll get together once a week to do training, usually in the evening, because they all have full time jobs as well. But as I said earlier in the, in the podcast, I think about a third of the UK firefighters are retained duty rds, on call firefighters and the other two thirds the whole time. But it very much depends where you are in the UK as to what that makeup is.

[20:43] Ed Mann: Okay? So here in the United States, that numbers flip. Like 85% of the, the firefighters in the United States are volunteers and the remaining are full time career firefighters. So. And the reason I asked for the explanation, I had two young men that work for me in England that became retained firefighters in a small village not far from the air base. And I know they went to basic training for, even though they were certified at a national level with the air force, they went to the basic training and they went through the entire application process. You explained it was pretty extensive. And then they went to a basic school for several weeks. They retained, as you said, with their safety ride ticket. I think they were there for a little more than a year and they had to go back to BA school before they were permitted to wear breathing apparatus, even after they got their safety ride ticket and they had to get through. I think it was almost I want to say a two week BA school sounds about right.

[21:53] Carl Batchelor: Yeah, about two weeks, yeah. Yeah.

[21:55] Ed Mann: And then they were able to return to their, their local fire brigade and actually be full fledged retainer firefighters. And they got paid when they trained, they got pain paid when they went on calls, et cetera, et cetera. So it was a pretty neat system and it sounds very similar to the system in Sweden.

[22:15] Carl Batchelor: So it's interesting because in the UK it's quite interesting. So typically, most of the shifts now, these aren't all the same, but the majority of shifts are two days, two nights and then four days off. A lot of our whole time firefighters are also retained firefighters on their days off. So they'll, they'll come off shift, they'll have a good night's sleep or a good day's sleep, and then they might put themselves on call on a retained system which is complete. It could be a different fire and rescue service, could be the neighbouring fire and rescue service where they live. So they might be whole time and retained, but they might work for two different organizations as well.

[22:54] Ed Mann: Okay. Lena, do you have anything you'd like to add to this part of the conversation?

[22:59] Lena Hakansson: No, I'm learning a lot, Carl. It's the same in Sweden. It's. Yeah. I see a lot of similarities in the swedish and UK.

[23:07] Ed Mann: I can tell you here in the US, we're beginning to see more and more what we call referred to as combination departments, where there'll be full time firefighters and there'll be volunteers. And then in a lot of cases, even the volunteers are being paid similar to your retained system now. And the reason is, is that we simply don't have enough volunteers to man the stations to provide adequate protection. So between the fire departments and the local governments, they've come up with. What we're referring to here in the US is combination systems. Wherever I. The fire station or the fire department may have 15 2025 full time people and they're supplemented by part time employees or by volunteers who are still getting paid when they do certain things for the fire service. Because we have a major recruiting issue here in the United States with volunteers and it gets worse and worse every year. So people have had to take a look at other systems. I really wish in some cases we would take a look at the european model and adopt it here in the US. I think it would save. Instead of reinventing the wheel, let's use a system that's, that's been in place for years and has proven that it works. So my hats off to you. Folks in Europe, with the systems you've been using for years, I just wish the US might take a harder look at those systems, rather than reinventing a completely different system here in the US, because what you're doing obviously works, or your national government would have gone a different direction by now. So hats off to the both of you. So, Carl, when I started in the fire service in the mid seventies, our initial attack lines on nearly every fire were what we call booster lines, ranging in sizes from a half inch to one inch in diameter. In fact, I was trained with John Bean. High pressure fog, 33 gallons a minute at 800 psi. Eventually, inch and a half preconnected lines, and then we moved to inch and three quarter pre connected lines. My point in all this, it seems to me that inch and three quarter preconnected lines have become the very first line pulled by the american fire department, regardless of the size of the fire. So my question to you, Carl, is what's the standard policy on an initial fire attack in the UK?

[25:57] Carl Batchelor: Right, so there isn't a standard policy as such, because what I'm going to talk about is what we did in the west and what I believe that most of the UK do. So most of the UK, their standard first port of call for a line would be a three quarter inch or inch high pressure hose reel. So I think you call it a red line over there, right? We have a high pressure red line, which is about 500 psi. So 30 to 40 bars in the UK, 500 psi converted to us. And that would be our standard sort of first approach would be to pull off the high pressure hose reel and use that. We're delivering somewhere in the region of 31 to 60 gallons a minute. That's all we're delivering initially. Now, the recognition is with a firefighters, if you go into a compartment fire or a building, and that 30 to 60 gallons a minute of water isn't doing enough, we can then come back out, we can then close the door to limit the ventilation, and we can then go back in with an inch and three quarter line. London fire brigade are slightly different. Their first port of attack will be an inch and three quarter line. They won't use high pressure hose reels in buildings at all. That's because of their own policies, they're written within their own organization, and that's entirely up to them, and that's their choice. Most services, though, because of the speed of attack, will use the high pressure hose reel because that can be taken off the truck within seconds and got to work within, within less than a minute. So that's pretty much our first port of call. If we deploy to a larger incident or a severe fire or a fire in the open or fire outside, we might pull off the inch and three quarter line, or even the two and three quarter inch line, and use that initially. And that's about 70 to 80 psi using a greater volume of water at a lower pressure.

[27:58] Ed Mann: So who makes that determination? Is it the officer in charge of the pump, or is it the firefighter? Who or the. Who makes a decision on that initial attack line?

[28:10] Carl Batchelor: I mean, so the initial attack is always made by the incident commander. So the incident commander would be the person in charge of the first fire appliance there until possibly a senior officer, a more senior officer gets there, but that certainly would be the person in charge of the first fire appliance. However, this is slightly different, I think, to the US model as well. When we send our BA guys in, our BA guys and girls in, so SCBA wearers into the building, our incident commander stays outside. He or she doesn't wear breathing apparatus, they'll be outside, and they're very much then reliant on the eyes and ears of the BA wearers inside the building. So if the BA wearers through the radio say to the incident commander, we haven't got enough water with the high pressure hose reel, we're coming out. Get us an inch and three quarter line. It's up to them to make that decision, because they're the ones inside exposed to that risk because of the training they've had. So they will then come out, and then they'll take an inch and three quarter line in because the three quarter inch high pressure hose reel wasn't enough. So ultimately, it's the incident commander's decision that he would rely on his or her crew's skillset to help make that educated decision.

[29:21] Ed Mann: Okay, so, Lena, I know you don't, you don't, you don't ride fire trucks anymore, but same question to you with the swedish fire service that.

[29:33] Lena Hakansson: Yeah, well, based on my experience and from what I've heard from today, I feel like we have basically the same procedure as Carl's been talking about, and I'm not sure at the hose and the pressure and so on, but I feel like it's basically the same. And I know that if we are going to a construction fires, I know that the initial preparation is to go five in the cars with one incident commander in the front, and then we are dressing for a Ba attack in the back. Like two. The Ba attack consists of two people with the masks on. And then they have a commander, a BA commander, a leader, you should say. And then when you, upon arrival, the BA leader and the incident commander takes a 360 around the, the house while the, the driver, who's become a pump operator, together with the two others doing the bi attack, prepare for the bi attack. So to say, they prepare the host lines and getting ready for, for doing an initial attack. Yeah, that's. Yep.

[30:48] Ed Mann: So it's somewhat similar to what we're doing in the US, but different at the same time. You know, like I said when I first started, I don't care how big the fire was, the first line that came off the engine, the pump was a booster reel. And then we progressed to the inch and a half preconnected lines, you know, 125 to 150 gallons a minute with 100 pounds nozzle pressure. Then we went to inch and three quarter hose with an inch and a half coupling. And it just seems to me at times, I watch a lot of videos now. I don't chase fire trucks anymore, and I've always been of the belief, right or wrong, you know, big fire, big water, bigger fire, bigger water. And, and that, it seems to me that a lot of times now I watch videos here in the US. Regardless of the size of the fire, the first thing that comes off the pump or the engine is an inch and three quarter line. And when you look at it, it's obvious that that's not enough gallons per minute versus the btus that you're faced with. And it, it just seems to me as though our inch and three quarter pre connected lines have become the booster reels of the 1970s. And a lot of times it's like an automatic thing, pull the inch and three quarter, because that's what you train on all the time. And then the first time you tell someone to pull a two and a half inch line with a larger nozzle, more flow, there's some difficulty in getting that done because we don't train on it as we should. So this kind of moves into the next question, and I got to set this up. So to our listeners, just bear with me till I set this up. An area I focused on for years as the state fire commissioner was reducing line and duty deaths. I worked very hard with national organizations and my staff to reduce line of duty deaths. In spite of those efforts, Pennsylvania still averaged ten line of duty deaths a year. In my research for our podcast today, I discovered a report offered by Stefan Seven, from 1936 through 2016 in Sweden, suffered only 56 line of duty deaths. In other words, in an 80 year period of time, there were fewer than two line of duty deaths a year. I also discovered that England, the UK suffered 56 fatalities and a 26 year period of time from 1986 through 2013. That also equates to two line of duty deaths a year. According to the United States Fire administration, we suffered 94 line of duty deaths in the US in 2022. So my question to both of you is, what are you doing differently? And Lena, I'll let you take the first crack at that.

[34:01] Lena Hakansson: That's a tough nuts, but I. I think that we are a smaller country and the firefighters are. We are training to get the basic. As a full time firefighter, you train for two years. So I think the minimum level of knowledge is quite good. And then we have all these, as you mentioned before, all the national standards, both for how to fight a fire and then how to do all this construction that are. We have houses made out of woods, though we know how to. We have a good standard to rely on building these houses. So I think the preventive work is a really good.

[34:59] Ed Mann: Are you saying that in Sweden you don't have the number of fires and the size of fires in Sweden that we do here in the US.

[35:11] Lena Hakansson: Without doing the research? Yeah, we don't have that much house fires actually in Sweden. But then.

[35:19] Ed Mann: Okay, so let me ask you this, Lena, and correct me if I'm wrong. How much time in your basic training as a firefighter are you learning about fire science and fire dynamics as part of your basic training?

[35:39] Lena Hakansson: I have no idea because I haven't got that basic training as a full firefighter. I have not gone through that, so I wouldn't know. I'm sorry.

[35:48] Ed Mann: Okay. That's all right. Carl, same question to you. What's the UK doing differently than what we're doing here in the US?

[35:59] Carl Batchelor: I think there are a number of things, Ed. One of them goes back to we are having a lot less fire. So remember earlier I spoke about the fire station I joined in the mid eighties? We were doing five to 6000 calls a year. That same fire station now is probably doing one and a half thousand calls a year, possibly 2000. And the reason for that is very similar to what Laina alluded to. People now are safer in the home. They've been educated more by fire and rescue services about fire safety. Electrical safety is better now, although we are starting to get a slight increase now with some of the cheap imported, for example, iPhone chargers or electro scooter chargers. So those are some of the. We get a little blip now, but generally we're getting less fires now than we used to. I think the way we approach firefighting in the UK is very. We are assertive, but we're also risk averse. So we have a very strict incident command structure. Nobody will do anything unless the incident commander tells them what to do, even if they think it's the right thing to do when we deploy SCBA, whereas into a risk area, every single SCBA set has a tally on it, and that tally will have the BA wearer's name and their cylinder pressure. That tally will then go in what we call an entry control board, and that board will be staffed by somebody outside of the risk area. So that's called the entry control operative. So that person then will monitor all of the bay wearers inside the incident, inside the risk area, so they will know exactly where they've gone. They'll know if they've gone in on a left hand search, a right hand search. They'll know if they've gone in searching. If they've gone in firefighting, they'll have communication with them. So at all times we'll know where they are, which hose line they're on, what their brief was and exactly what they're doing. So we can account for all of our behaviors at all times. If we're sending behaviors in from the front and the back, we'll have another entry control point set up at the back of the building, so again, we can account for them going in the back and the front. What we need to remember is, as well, and this is something we do, I think, reasonably well in the UK, we slow down a little bit. So Laina mentioned it earlier, we'll always do a 360 of a building, so we'll always do that full circular check of the building to find out if there is a better access, because sometimes going a little bit slower is going a little bit more efficiently. There's no point in running in the front door if the wind is coming from the back of the house, blowing all the smoke and fire gases towards you, when actually, logically, it might be easier to get around the back, and then we've got the wind blowing in our favour, blowing all the fire gases away from us. Probably over 50% of the UK now use offensive ventilation, so we can use ppv fans, positive pressure ventilation fans, to clear out a building either during or pre ba attack, so we can clear out the fire gases, make visibility safer, make it safer for the casualty if they're in there. The other thing on that is less than a quarter of a percent of all fires result in a fatality. Less than 5% of all fires we go to involve people. So 95% of the time when we mobilize to a building fire, there's nobody in there. So actually there's no rush. The building construction again. And this is why it's different. In the UK, our building construction typically is brick. So that behaves significantly differently to a timber frame building, which I know you've got a lot of in the. In the US and also in Sweden, we are moving now to more timber framed, brick faced domestic properties, but traditional properties for us, they're only going to burn the roof and the windows off, but the building structure will be there. We also use anti ventilation as a technique. So we all know about the triangle of fire, fuel, heat and oxygen. And by reducing or removing any one of those sides of that triangle, we can put the fire out. Typically, we put the blue stuff on, the red stuff, we put the water to reduce the heat, that reduces that part of the triangle, puts the fire out. But what we can also do, turn the air off. So by us mobilizing to a structure that's ventilated, for example, with the front door wide open, it's being fed by oxygen. What we'll do, we'll close that front door whilst we're setting up our hose lines, whilst we're setting up our safety jets, while we're setting up our SCPA wearers. Closing the front door limits the oxygen going into that fire. Therefore combustion will slow down. It will slow down because the brick built structure will hold that fire in place for a significant amount of time. We can then go in, limiting the ventilation and then deal with the fire from inside. So we do approach fires a little bit differently, because I think one of the main reasons is about building construction, but the other main reason is about incident command structure and the entry control outside that I spoke about earlier.

[41:06] Ed Mann: So, in your basic training of your fire service and even your advanced training, how much time do you spend focused on what we're referring to in the US as fire dynamics? To your point about closing the front door? Okay. Here in the US, in the last, I'll say the last 910 years, underwriters laboratory, the Firefighter Safety Research institute, has been doing a lot of studies and a lot of teaching on fire dynamics. Yeah. And it's finally becoming part of the basic fire training for firefighters now in their entry level training. Yeah. How much of that is taught on the front end to your fire service when they get their initial training?

[42:00] Carl Batchelor: Okay, so again, all fire and rescue services are slightly differently. But a prime example would be, for example, two weeks focusing on basically SCBA. So that's your breathing out, practice your safe movement in the building, searching, and then a further week on what we call your fire dynamics is what we call fire behavior. So that talks about how a fire behaves, we talk about ventilation profile of a building, we talk about fuel loading, we talk about how a fire behaves with regard to flashover backdraft, how training the ventilation profile can change actually how the fire behaves. So we could spend a week doing that as well on top of the two weeks SCBA. And then that's a continuous training cycle then. So that will be covered either annually or every two years. We focus quite heavily on actually believe it's quite important, but it's very important.

[42:56] Ed Mann: Okay, so both of you made the point that you have fewer fires. And I will tell you that in the US, the number of fires that we respond to has gone down drastically. I mean, when I started in the seventies, even through even the mid eighties, it wasn't uncommon for me to see four or five, what we refer to as working fires, a month. Now, some of our fire service may go an entire year and not see anything more than a room and contents fire, but yet our injuries and line of duty deaths while they've gone down are still, in my opinion, too high. And again, to our listeners, I'm not trying to offend the us fire service. I just want the us fire service to understand that obviously there's a different and safer way of doing what we do based on what our friends in Europe are doing, just based on the number of line of duty deaths. And Carl, to your point, you know, the military family housing I lived in when I was in England, I mean, it was a concrete building. The walls were concrete, covered in plaster, you know, so basically, if you had a fire in it, you could go in and wash the building out, fix their plaster up and move back into it the following week. But I also saw more and more new construction. That was the typical us wood frame. Yeah, timber. Which meant that, you know, the types of fires were going to change drastically for the uk fire service. But even though the constructions changed, your line of duty deaths and injuries have not jumped up significantly. So you're doing something different. And that's the point I'm trying to make here. To those of you from the US, I'm not picking a fight, I'm not downgrading the us fire service. I'm just saying, folks, there's a. There's a different way of doing what we're doing and we should pay a little more attention to what our friends are doing in Europe. That's my point in all this.

[45:11] Carl Batchelor: Ed, can I just balance the scales a little bit there, if you don't mind? I think what you guys do really well over there in the US. Your driver, your engineers, your pump operators, we call them pump operator driver in the UK. From what I've seen, your engineers are highly trained and understand the pump like the back of their hand. They understand flow rate, they understand incoming water, outgoing water. I think they probably understand that a lot better than a lot of our 5000 in the UK do. So we still talk about pressure when we should be talking about flow and volume. And we started to turn that corner a little bit. But I think we've got a lot to learn from you guys as well. So it's not all about us.

[45:51] Ed Mann: And I'm looking at it from a safety point of view. Okay. I just, you know, during my tenure as a fire commissioner, and I don't want to go down this rabbit hole, but I attended, well, in a 14 year period of time, I attended over 100 line of duty death funerals in my state alone. Now granted, some of those were heart attacks and strokes. Yeah. But some of those were avoidable. And it all came down to, you know, if you look at the reports that the National Institute Occupational and Safety Health, right, when we have a line of duty death in the US, one of the number one things constantly is lack of incident command and lack of communication. Yeah. Are two of the top five reasons that show up report after report after report. So again, to my brothers and sisters in the US, I don't want you to think I'm bashing the us fire service. I just want you to think about what our friends are doing across the pond that might make a difference and what we're doing here in the US. And spend a little more time learning about fire behavior and fire dynamics. You know, our entry level fire training program. You might get 3 hours of training on fire behavior. You're telling me your folks get an entire week of it? So it's. That's all I'm trying to do. I'm trying to get our foot, my brothers and sisters in the US to look at things through a different lens. So. All right, so before we move on to the topic of the cold cut cobra system, do you have any. Lena, do you have any closing thoughts on any of the things that we talked about previously? No, I don't have that okay, Carl.

[47:55] Carl Batchelor: No, I just think having, having worked in more and more countries over the world now with firefighters, both local authority and uniformed military firefighters, I think we generally all speak the same language, just with a different accent and a different uniform. And I think we can all learn from each other, actually, if we talk more.

[48:13] Ed Mann: So I got to share this story with you. It's kind of funny when you talk about the same language. So before I left RAF Alkonbury, they closed the air dome and the fire service was being turned back basically to control the British. So we had a lot of british civilians that came to the air base and needed to learn how to use the fire apparatus that the US military was using. So I was the training officer and we were doing training on our pumps, on our engines, our pumpers. And I said to them at the very beginning of the day, if I say something you don't quite understand, please ask for me to clarify it. So after spending an entire day of training on a centrifugal pump, an individual at the end of the day raised his hand and said, I have a question. I said, what's that? And his question was, is centrifugal the same as centrifugal? I said, so we've spent 8 hours with one another today and you weren't sure if centrifugal and centrifugal were the same thing. You finally asked the question. So anyway, and I don't know if he asked a question to make a funny or if he was serious, but nonetheless, I answered his question. So. All right, so let's move on to the cold. The cold cut cobra. So I've done some limited research and I have to say from the videos I've seen, it's a pretty impressive tool. Lena, you work at cold cut systems and method and training development. Tell our listeners what your duties entail.

[50:02] Lena Hakansson: Well, I do agree with you. It is an impressive tool. And I get impressed every day at work because my job in training and method development is it allows me to explore new methods on how to use Cobra and how it can assist the fire service with. There was specific problem areas such as EV's. And that's the latest that we have studied, actually, on how Cobra can be used in relation to fires in electric vehicles. And we have just a teaser. We have developed a method that we now are training our users in. In addition, this, the entire use of cobra, the cutting extinguisher is sort of, I should say, emphasized by training. I don't know if that's the correct word, but we do deliver trainings on all sorts of levels, starting with the instructor training, like train the trainer, and then we have incident commander training and refresher courses and more specific courses such as shipboard firefighting and the latest EV fires. In my job, I get to develop these sort of courses and trainings for the subcommittee.

[51:28] Ed Mann: Carl, you're part of the cold cut systems team as a tactical firefighting coordinator. Please tell our listeners what your duties consist of.

[51:38] Carl Batchelor: So predominantly, my role was as part of this small United Kingdom team. So we have a subsidiary group of us working out of the UK and we're there to support existing uk customers. So any instructor training in, instructor revalidation training with our existing customers, I will lead on that. I will make sure we've got the right staff there, make sure the venues are correct, make sure the venues are suitable, carry out the risk assessments. I'll also lead on any potential new customer engagement. So if we want to run a demonstration for a potential new customer again, I will organise the venue, organize that demonstration as well. One of my roles is also to support Lena. Laina and I were on a call this morning discussing some other stuff, so I'm always happy to support Laina in her job based out of Sweden because of the wonders of modern technology as we know now, Ed, in the US and Sweden and the UK, I can pick up teams, call or a phone and just chat to Lena and support her a lot as well. As I said earlier, my background really in the fire service was SCBA fire behavior and tactical ventilation training. So that's when I sort of slot in with a Cobra team and how the Cobra then have. The Cobra system can be embedded in an organization, whether it be new or old. So a lot of customers, existing customers, may not be using the Cobra system to its full potential. So we can explore how we can support them to sort of move that deployment on and again with a new customer, we can talk to them about their specific risks and then how Cobra might support them in their, in their risk profile as a sort of mitigation measure.

[53:18] Ed Mann: Okay, so Laina creates the training and the methods, and then you work with her and then you basically deliver the trainings. What I'm hearing pretty much, I'm one.

[53:31] Carl Batchelor: Of a bunch of instructors who will deliver the training. So my main role is on UK based, but I've also worked in the Netherlands, in Sweden, in Estonia, more recently in the US, various other countries. But yeah, that's pretty much in a Nutshell, Ed, what we do. Yeah.

[53:46] Ed Mann: Okay, so here's a question. Either one of you can take. How did the development of the cobra system even come about? I mean, who created it? How? Why was it created? And either one of you can take that question.

[54:03] Carl Batchelor: I think Lane is probably the best place to answer that one.

[54:06] Lena Hakansson: I'll take that. So it's. It's the founder, Lars Lars G. Larson, who. He was a sea captain, and he had a company which was specialized in cold cutting techniques, which allowed, like, cutting in explosive and combustible environments without adding heat. And then we had an accident within the fire and rescue services where a firefighter got stuck. He was up on a roof and tried to make a hole. And, yeah, he fell through the roof. And then that's when the swedish rescue service agency, that now is the swedish civil continuous agency, decided to we need to do to make holes in another way, in a more safer way. So that's when Larch. Yeah. Said, I have a tool. They tried to create ventilation holes with this cutting extinguisher, and they found that the effect turned out to be even better than just a hole. Since the cobra can cut through any building materials, I don't think we have reached. We haven't yet found any material that we can't cut through. But as soon as the water yet came through the roof, there was an instant drop in temperature. And that's where it all came about. And in the beginning, initially, the cobra was mounted on an aerial platform, and that's where the name came from, because someone at an exhibition said it's things like a cobra. And that's where cobra came from. But nowadays, we have. Since 1998, we have handheld Lance we use instead. So that's the story behind cobra.

[56:13] Ed Mann: Okay. And to our listeners, just so you know, we will be doing a live webinar with both of these folks on September 24. And you'll have an opportunity, I'm sure, to see some videos and some other PowerPoint slides that give you even a better description of what the cold cut system is all about. So basically, it's a tool that allows you to punch a hole in something to get water into a confined space. Yeah. Okay.

[56:49] Lena Hakansson: It allows you to fight the fire from the outside if we're talking about fire, gas cooling, which is one way to use the cutting extinguisher.

[56:59] Ed Mann: So it gives me an opportunity to get water into a confined space or into a space without actually having to put people in that space until I can bring the temperature down to something that's a little safer, and then I can put people in that space.

[57:15] Lena Hakansson: Yeah. Without adding any extra oxygen.

[57:19] Ed Mann: Excellent. I'm really looking forward to the webinar that we're going to do. So, how widespread is the use of the Copra system in Europe?

[57:30] Lena Hakansson: So, today there are about 1300 systems in 45 countries worldwide. And most of the cobra systems, I should say, are used by municipal fire and rescue services. But it's also used in industries like refineries and car production, and chemical processing industries, and nuclear. It's a wide range of using areas, but most of the systems are, as I said, used by municipal fire and rescue services.

[58:05] Ed Mann: Okay, great. I know this next question may create some controversy with our listeners, especially the us listeners, given the fact that us firefighters have been told not to pierce lithium ion battery compartment, and watching videos and having conversations with other members of your team. I know our brothers and sisters with the European Fire Service are being told the complete opposite, especially when using the cobra system. Can either of you explain to me why the european battery and car manufacturers have a different approach or tactic? In other words, here in the US, we've been told by the battery manufacturers and the EV car manufacturers never pierce the battery compartment of a lithium ion battery. But it appears as though with the cold cut system, there are more and more european fire departments doing it. And the manufacturers of the batteries in Europe and the car manufacturers are saying it's okay to pierce the battery compartment. Can either of you explain why there's a difference between what the folks in Europe and Europe are saying versus what the car manufacturers in the US are saying?

[59:27] Carl Batchelor: I'll start with that one if you like, Ed. And then Lana can pick up on anything she needs to add afterwards. I think there's a couple of differences, and I think one. One revolves around the information we're given by the car manufacturers and the information we retrieve as first responders. So, in Europe, we use euro rescue data app, which we can pull up the car details. It tells us where the battery is, where the isolation points are, what to do in the event of fire. I'm pretty sure a lot of you guys over there use EV rescue, which will do exactly the same thing. Now, historically, a lot of those apps were saying, with regard to a lithium ion battery, do not pierce the battery. Now, this is semantics. Now, we're not piercing the battery physically, we're piercing the battery hydraulically. So there's a key difference for a start. But if I look at the Scoda Euro rescue data app that now says, get water inside the battery pack, it doesn't tell us how to do that. Although historically, one of the rescue data sheets did say use cobra from coca systems to get water into the battery pad, but it does now say get water into the battery pad. I generally think there's a lack of understanding around the capabilities of cobra. So I think people, specifically car manufacturers and battery manufacturers, haven't caught up about what it is and what its capabilities are as of yet. We found out by accident that Cobra was a suitable solution for dealing with a lithium ion battery fire. So we have. So we, we have a big presence in a Skoda factory in the Czech Republic. So they have their own internal firefighting teams, their works fire department, if you like, and they have a very impressive fleet of. Fleet of fire appliances. A large proportion of those fire appliances have cobra for use on the production line and within their factory, which is the size of a small town. Unbeknownst to us, they'd started doing some work on the, on their electric vehicles with regard to lithium ion batteries, and they started doing tests on the actual lithium ion battery packs and full electric vehicles using cobra to pierce through the vehicle floor from inside the vehicle to get water flowing inside the battery pack. If you think of a lithium ion battery pack as a really shallow bathtub, the only way of putting out that lithium ion battery pack is by filling up that bathtub full of water. And you can only do that by injecting water or piercing through the outside to get water in. Because of the chemistry within a lithium ion battery, putting water on it is the same as putting water on a roof. It's going to do nothing. The water will flow off the roof, it will flow off the top of the battery. We have to get water in it to stop that propagation from cell to cell to cell. We're never going to stop the actual individual cell. It's going to film a runaway. We've lost that. All we're trying to do is stop it spreading from batch battery cell to battery cell, or from module to module. And we do that by getting water injected through the cobra system into the battery pack. That's how it works. Um, in the UK, in Sweden, in Europe, and indeed in the US, there was an incident in Tempe, Arizona, where we have cobra presence over there. They actually use cobra on a Tesla fire, the first ever recorded use of cobra being used on a Tesla fire. And they effectively put out that Tesla fire using about 270 gallons of water instead of, um, significantly more that would normally be used, if you could call it from the outside. We've also got case studies where it's been used successfully in Norway, on an EV in Prague, in the Czech Republic on an EV. In the Netherlands, in the Czech Republic, on a small battery storage system, which was a lithium ion based system, which they use cobra within the vicinity of the house to stop the thermal runaway prior to cutting out the battery back from the house and taking it outside and then destroying it with Cobra. So we know it works. What we need to do now is just convince the vehicle manufacturers and the battery manufacturers that it works as a safe and effective method for dealing with anything in my battery fires.

[01:03:46] Ed Mann: Okay. Laina, do you have anything you like to add to what Carl just said?

[01:03:51] Carl Batchelor: Yeah.

[01:03:52] Lena Hakansson: Well, as we say, like, the difference between the US or the Europe is like, no, just bottom line is that no intervention is entirely risk free. And whether it's a construction fire or as we are talking about an EV fire, so we just need to find a way to manage that risk and so that it's a feasible tactic or procedure. And we have seen way too many, too much devastation from, caused by lithium ion batteries burning or exploding. So the best measure is, of course, to take away the root cause. But we can't do that. We just have to find a way forward for the fire and rescue service to actually handle it or to manage these types of fire. And this is one way to handle it, to get the water into the battery pack.

[01:04:51] Ed Mann: Well, I'm hopeful with your continued work and the fact that I know you now have some of the systems here in the US, and we'll talk about that here in a little bit, that our us car manufacturers and battery manufacturers will come out with some different guidance. And so we have yet another tool in the toolbox to deal with the lithium ion battery fires. So, Laina, you may be able to answer this one more so than Carl. Have any third party organizations tested and improved the method being used with the cobra system for EV fires? I mean, now Carl mentioned it's been used successfully, but have there been any third party organizations tested and improved the method that's being used?

[01:05:44] Lena Hakansson: Yes. Carl mentioned Skoda in the Czech Republic who they use Cobra. That's where this method came about. They told us that they are using it on their industry. Fire and rescue service is using cobra when battery catches or go to thermal Runway or propagates within the industry in production, I should say. Sorry.

[01:06:10] Ed Mann: Okay.

[01:06:11] Lena Hakansson: Also, we've done this method. We confirmed this method together as a partner, together with the swedish contingency Agency and also other stakeholders. And based on that, the MSPSA called, wrote a report, and based on that report, this method has developed further. Is the NIPVs in the Netherlands, they have also done further testing to confirm this method. We recently had Alethea, or an EV fire in the Netherlands, where they used this exact method.

[01:06:52] Ed Mann: So, excuse me, who or what is Skoda?

[01:06:58] Carl Batchelor: Skoda are a massive car manufacturer over in Europe. So they're part of the Volkswagen Audi group.

[01:07:05] Ed Mann: Okay, perfect. All right, great. So after spending some time with talking to Fergie and Johan at the International Fire chief's fire Rescue International last month, I'm aware of situations involving building fires where the Cobra system was deployed. One particular incident stood out with me. It involved a row of apartments, flats with the. With the running fire and the void above the ceiling from one end to the other. The cobra system was deployed into the void and the fire was quickly brought under control. Carl, can you share any other examples of how the cobra system was deployed?

[01:07:48] Carl Batchelor: Yeah, I will. Briefly, I was going to talk to you about a little story we. When I was. When we were training the guys over in Tempe, Arizona, there was a probation firefighter with a SCBA sound using a chainsaw up a ladder to do a gable end attack. So attacking for a. Yeah, for a loft entry to ventilate. And we were there with our cobra system where we said, don't you think it'd be a really good idea just to just use the cobra from outside the building, either from the floor below, up through the ceiling, or off a ladder just through the gable end, and deploy cobra like that for an attic fire? Safer, much cleaner from outside. And there's a recognition then that actually, yeah. Even though the Tempe guys have bought Cobra purely for its EV capability, we told them about some of the systems and some of the techniques we've been using over in Europe and the UK, and they quite like those ideas. We were not fortunate enough to go and try and change the way the US approached their firefighting. I'm not that naive. You guys do a great job the way you do it, and I'm not going to change that overnight. But when we spoke about using our attics or lofts on basement fires, on ships, on trash trucks, combine harvesters, silos, ducting, trunking grassland wildfires, any fire where you don't want to send or you can't send a firefighter, Cobe was a solution for that. There was a really interesting job at Christie Hospital in Manchester, going back April 17. They had a fire in the roof of the hospital. Now, within the hospital, epcot, they had a cancer scanner, MRI scanner, and I think there were either two or three years worth of research on that scanner. Now the fire was in the building above the scanner. They tried putting water on the fire externally, but again, what a roof's designed to do, they're designed to hold water off. They weren't having an effect. Manchester, one of the early adopters of cobra in the UK. So Manchester used multiple cobra systems. I think they used three or four different cobra systems from the roof pointing in towards the building to contain the fire externally from a point of safety. And not only did that save the roof, it saved the years and years and years of research, it saved the scanner. And they were able to get the hospital cancer department back up and running within a matter of months instead of a matter of years. So that's a really good example I use, but the other examples are more general and we use it a lot for those ones I've spoken about. So basements for me as a firefighter, they're always quite nasty, horrible jobs to go to. So we're going down through the chimney to get into a basement. Well, let's just put the cobra through the floor. Let's deal with that fire and make it cooler and safer before we even send our firefighters in there. The same with an attic or a loft space. Let's do that. All these hard to reach airs where we possibly might have to start cutting, cutting things away to access it. Cobra is a possible solution for those type of things.

[01:10:46] Ed Mann: Lane, the same question to you.

[01:10:48] Lena Hakansson: Yeah, well, I have a case where we use cobra. Not we, but the organization used cobra as a heat shielding, actually, where it was two barns rather close to each other. I think there was like one or 2 meters and one of the barns were fully developed fire. So the commander decided to let that go and save the other building. So they created this excellent water mist from the cobra. We haven't mentioned it, but it's a 300 bars system and the water is 200 meters/second I'm using metrics. I'm sorry.

[01:11:31] Carl Batchelor: So that's 4300 psi at 447 miles an hour.

[01:11:36] Lena Hakansson: I think you can imagine it's massive. And this creates like infinitely small water drops which creates a great surface area. There is a great shield from the heat from the burning barn and to the adjacent barn. And that made it work. We could save the other building. This throw range from cobra is 30 40 meters. So it's a giant boundary cooling like a peacock's tail, you could say. Okay, so that, yeah, it did work and protected the other house.

[01:12:17] Ed Mann: So when we do our webinar, if and again we're scheduled to do it on September 24. If you have to incorporate some other examples other than just lithium ion ev fires that you can share with us during the webinar, it would be one, very helpful your product and two, very helpful to the us fire service to be able to look at this technology. So I'm not telling you what to do in your webinar. I'm just offering a suggestion that that might be very helpful not only to the us fire service, but very helpful to cobra cold cut as well. So. And it kind of leads me into the next question. I know Mesa, Arizona, and you mentioned tempe. Arizona has purchased the systems and they've even asked for additional systems to put on additional rigs on additional apparatus. What other us fire departments have purchased the us cobra system?

[01:13:22] Carl Batchelor: Yeah, can I just clarify the mesa thing, Ed? I think it's. At the moment it's just Tempe.

[01:13:27] Ed Mann: Okay.

[01:13:27] Carl Batchelor: I think we're talking to Mesa, but it was Tempe were the first people in the US to buy the cobra system. We are currently talking to 19 fire departments in the US. We've got live quotations sitting with them. We're currently talking FDM White are in the process of buying a couple of, couple of units for their fire departments. We're just looking at how that's configured on their vehicles. We're working with them very closely at the moment to make sure that happens. And we're hoping to get about 15 orders in 2025 from the US.

[01:13:58] Ed Mann: As we're nearing the end of the podcast, do either of you have any closing thoughts you'd like to share with our audience? And it doesn't have to be this specific to the topic we talked about today.

[01:14:10] Carl Batchelor: First of all, I've got a request of the audience that's just to keep an open mind about cobra ultra high pressure lance and its capabilities. I know it might not sit comfortably with a lot of people about. About what it does and how it does things, but just keep an open mind until you've seen the podcast and you've seen some of the videos and some of the pictures and we can explain it a little bit more. I think videos and pictures paint a thousand words. So hopefully that should clarify some of the issues that people may have with it. Also, remember, it's not a solution to all fires, but it's a solution to a lot of fires. The other thing with regard to the EV solution, there's a lot of products out there which we which say they will deal with an EV fire. Fantastic. That's great. This is a solution that was designed before EV's were even invented. This is a standing solution that's been around for 2030 years now, which also deals with EV fires, which I think was incredibly interesting. When we went out to Tempe to do the training, we focused on the EV capability, but then also spoke at some depth and ran some exercises, actually by request of the customer in Tempe. With regards to what we're doing in the UK and in wider Europe, they're quite keen on exploring some of the things we're doing because it may well fit into some of the us models. The other thing we haven't spoken about at the moment, and I know this is an issue in the US, it's an issue for all firefighters across the world. It's contamination. The World Health Organization now classified our job as firefighters as a category one occupation, which means firefighting is carcinogenic to humans, sending firefighters into buildings with fire gases and poisonous smoke and vapors, when a lot of the time we don't need to. As Laina spoke about earlier, we can deal with a lot of these incidents from outside. We can make it cooler, cleaner, safer, using cobra from outside. We can then ventilate the remaining fire gases and steam. We can then send our firefighters in just to mop it up afterwards, thus reducing massively exposure to those toxins. Hopefully meaning they'll live a little bit longer than they would, hadn't they done that in the first place. So, certainly in the UK and I know in Sweden and wider Europe, the contamination is on a lot of people's radar now. So we're now moving. So a lot of services are moving to a clean cab policy where if you've worn your turnout gear once, that'll get bagged up, it'll go into laundry, your SCBA kit will go in a locker, it won't go in the cab with you. Shower within the hour, so you're washing all those contaminants off. We'll have. We'll have wipes to wipe all the contaminants off. So we're really moving forward on that at a fair old rate at the moment. And I know that's happening in the US as well. So again, that's a big one for me, the contamination issue.

[01:17:03] Ed Mann: So, to your point, I've read the results of some of your studies and watched some of the videos using the cold cut system and then the ventilation, and I'm really impressed with what I'm seeing there. You know, the US fire service in the last, I'll say, five years has really jumped on board with the contamination and doing preliminary exposure reduction at the fire scene, the clean cab concept, using wipes, you know, the. So I'm not sure where all that started, but I'm glad to see that the us fire service, for the most part, is getting on board with it. You're always going to have pockets of resistance to anything new. That's just, that's typical of, I guess, human nature.

[01:17:56] Carl Batchelor: That's the same in the UK as well. Yeah, absolutely.

[01:17:59] Ed Mann: And one of the things that I kind of, I do a two hour presentation on good, better best practices for cancer risk reduction. And because, let's face it, some departments can't afford to do the absolute best at the, at reducing the contamination. But there are good things, easy, inexpensive things you can do upfront. There are some better things with a little bit of forethought, maybe a little bit of money you can do. And then if budget isn't a question, then you can go and get the gold star. But doing something is better than doing nothing at all.

[01:18:40] Carl Batchelor: Absolutely.

[01:18:42] Ed Mann: Yeah. And I've read your results of some of those, those testing that you've done with the cold cut system and the ventilation, and I'm pretty impressed with the results I'm seeing. So we just got to get the right organizations in the US to pay attention to it. So it trickles its way from the top down here in the US sooner rather than later. So, Lena and Carl, I want to thank you immensely for taking the time to join me today. I'm looking forward to our live webinar on September 24 at 10:00 a.m. eastern Standard Time. To our regular webinar listeners, please note the time change. While we normally do live webinars at 07:00 p.m. eastern standard, we had to change the times to accommodate the time differences. To sign up for the webinar and view our previously recorded webinars, please visit the link in our episode notes. Share this podcast with your colleagues. You can send them our subscription link, also found in the show notes. Lastly to our listeners, if you have any questions or need additional information, or if you have an idea for a future webinar or podcast, please email us at info@providentins.com station 19 two signing off. Until the next time, stay safe for your family's sake.