In this training video, Valerie Solano, instructor at Twisted Fire Industries, discusses the benefits of wearing a firefighter SCBA pack at Carolina Fire Days 2023 in Charlotte, North Carolina.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:
It’s totally normal to wear your pack. It’s totally normal to be on air, um, an overhaul and all the things. I hope that that’s what you are doing. If you guys are not doing that would be a conversation to have with your husbands or significant others that they are wearing their pack during all those things, because every time that they’re not, it’s an exposure.
Everything is being burnt right now. Um, like, everything in my house is made of pretty much MDF, which is glued together wood, okay, and styrofoam and plastic. So, all that emits horrible chemicals for us. Okay. And if we can mitigate that, right, we can’t eliminate it. But if we can mitigate it, that’s what we’re going to try to do. Um, NFPA requires that now all packs have a pass device. So, a personal accountability safety system, uh, mounted and integrated into the pack.
This alarm, if your firefighter has a fall, is lost. Is collapse any reason and stops moving for a set period of time? It goes off and it starts beeping. Before then, it alarms. So, it kind of gives you an idea and then it increases, increases and sets off an alarm. Kind of like a game of Marco Polo. So that once it goes off interior in a building, I’m able to hear where they’re at and start making my way to them. So, if you notice what your firefighters are doing, a lot of times that training, you guys will see it tomorrow is they’ll be moving around constantly like this at training. Okay. If you guys do this for about five minutes, I want to know how exhausted you get by just moving around.
It takes pretty much like I said, it takes – it’s not oxygen. It’s just regular breathing air that goes through a compressor, gets squished down into a bottle, goes in here. There’s a device in here that takes that from high pressure to breathing pressure that you could actually breathe. And it requires a negative pressure in order to actually breathe in that air, which means that you have to use your lungs and your diaphragm to draw a breath.