Industrial fire-fighters must receive the highest standard of training possible

Robert Moore, Division Director of the Emergency Training Services Institute at TEEX, tells Chris Beck about the challenges of training fire-fighters around the world for industrial disasters
What sort of industrial training do TEEX offer?
TEEX offers training in all aspects of emergency response to include Industrial response. All of our courses comply with NFPA Standards and most are Proboard certified. The most popular industrial training we are currently doing on the firefighting side is NFPA 1081 certification – interior, exterior and leadership training. We also offer customised industrial training to meet the core objectives of our clients may be. Often large companies with facilities spread worldwide request to do a large corporate school, bringing employees from all of their facilities to College Station, Texas Brayton Fire Field. During these schools we customise the training to meet their needs.
Just as Industrial response is different than municipal response, so is the aspect of training for both. During my career I have worked in both arenas and the response to each has its own unique challenges and must be handled differently. Both types of response has a primary Life Safety concern. Typically with an Industrial event in a plant or factory setting you have a better accountability for the area involved. Also both types need a good strategy and tactical planning before any fire-fighting takes place but with Industrial response comes the concern of what type of chemicals or material may be involved. If you are an Industrial plant brigade most of the time you will already have this information through preplans. If you do not have this information you will need to approach it more on a defensive mode and as the information comes in to command start moving to an offense mode.
What are the main risks that you prepare your students for?
Our goal is to prepare our students to face any situation they may come across with Life Safety being the most important. At Brayton Field we have the most realistic industrial burn props in the world replicating process units that you would find in refining and chemical operations. All of our industrial props are designed by our Industrial staff who have worked in the industry and have responded to all of these types of events. Since there is a difference in response techniques and terminology between an industrial response and a municipal response, we have chosen to have our Instructors teaching each to come from that industry or Fire Department. This allows us to make the training as realistic as possible and teach our students proper strategy and tactics for each. We make sure the student gets the type of training they are coming to TEEX for.
How important is realistic hands-on training for fire-fighters?
It’s crucial that you not only get the classroom portion of the training, but also quality hands-on training as well. If students can see, for example, the way water patterns can be used to protect themselves and equipment from flame impingement, or how foam operations work and how to deal with pressure fires versus atmospheric types, that can only help reinforce the message they had heard in the classroom and help them better understand their life safety responsibilities.
What range of industrial situations do you cater for?
Our primary Industrial training is based on the petrochemical and refinery industries. Companies like Exxon Mobil, BP and Shell are our largest client base. We train them in response to process fires, transportation emergencies, hazardous materials response, rescue operations, storage tank fires, and emergency medical response.
How do you teach your students to be aware of the risks of fire on top of the fire-fighting techniques?
We teach our students pre-planning, where we send them to a tank farm, for example, and plan what type of fire scenario could arise. We then put together a pre-plan that can be implemented should that situation happen. Doing that increases the safety for the fire-fighters, meaning they already know what equipment is likely to be available in the area, what sort of fire situation – pressure, gas, liquid and so on – may arise, what sorts of chemicals they may be dealing with. This allows them to choose the best personal protective equipment to ensure their own safety, work out how many members of the public or staff may be in an area and in need of rescue, and who is accountable for what.
How do you ensure that the equipment that you use is as modern and up-to-date as possible?
We work with our numerous vendors, who help us with supplying the most up-to-date tools for our fire-fighters to use in the training field. We make sure that the equipment is true-to-life and unaltered and give the students the chance to try different types of the same tool. We don’t typically recommend one particular brand or manufacturer, but we would recommend different types. For example, if we have a new type of foam eductor, we may encourage our students to work with it and look at vendors who produce products like it.
How have you seen the techniques that are taught change over the years, and do you think standards of training globally are as high as they should be?
Techniques do evolve. We learn through trial and era. The best place to learn is on the training ground and not an emergency scene. We allow our students to try different techniques and make mistakes to learn from. In terms of training around the world, the more industrialised countries tend to be a bit further ahead of the curve as far as adopting new techniques and equipment is concerned. We do training all over the world, not just here in Texas. We are in 58 different countries, dealing with our students and offering training in all four corners of the globe, and take the most up-to-date techniques and equipment with us to our students, wherever they may be.
We have what we call Cooperative Learning Centres all over the world where we work with native instructors and teach them how we do things at TEEX. We then certify the training they offer to our standards, and go back on a regular basis to ensure everything is running smoothly.
How do you see fire risks changing in the future, and how will training methods have to adapt? Will technology and automation become more prevalent, for example?
I think technology is advancing quickly. The rollout of robotics technology and drones that can give an alternative perspective of a fire scene are great. You will never be able to get rid of people. I don’t feel that you will ever reach a situation where you don’t need people on the ground. If you rely more heavily on technology, you will still need someone able to operate the equipment. You will always need to have fire-fighters who can deal with the fire situation by either utilising existing technologies or leveraging new ones.
The initial concern of a fire-fighter is – and always will be – life safety; you will always need a human to perform rescue situations, and I can’t see a robot ever being able to do that.
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