October

Changing the way we do business

Dr Stefan Svensson – Swedish Fire Service

On Wednesday 10th Oct 2007 the Christchurch group of the SFPE and the IFE Canterbury group hosted Dr Stefan Svensson from the Swedish Fire Service to present a seminar on the changes to the Swedish Fire Service response to emergency incidents. Around 20 people attended the seminar being a mixture of University of Canterbury academics and students, New Zealand Fire Service personnel and other industry professionals.

Stefan spoke about the history and the structure of the Swedish Fire Service and noted a number of similarities with the New Zealand Fire Service with regard to the numbers and distribution of full-time and volunteer personnel. Even though voluntary crews are paid for their time during their attendance at an incident, Sweden is finding it difficult to recruit volunteers and to have them available in rural locations during the daytime. Many people travel to local towns to get to their workplace and commercial pressures mean that employers are reluctant to have staff attend incidents during work time.

Stefan sees that fire science and engineering can offer technological solutions to the challenges faced by modern fire services and the high expectations made on them by society. Stefan described how the Swedish Fire Service is looking at alternative ways in which to provide personnel to an incident. Instead of a crew arriving together at a central fire station and then travelling to the scene, the concept of ‘first responders’ being able to attend the scene directly is being developed. First responders would have a vehicle available to them wherever they are based and would arrive ahead of the remainder of the crew. The first responders would then be able to begin to assess the situation and make preparation for the arrival of follow up resources.

© Kristin Hoskin

Stefan then went on to show a number of videos of fire extinguishing experiments he is currently involved in where he is examining the effectiveness of different media that might be used by a first responder. He concluded there is much the scientific community can offer the fire services in terms of technological solutions and similarly there is much the fire services can offer the fire science community in terms of practical experience in tackling real fires. He urged both communities to better share their knowledge in the future.

At the end of the presentation there was considerable debate amongst the participants. There was support for the first responder concept for particular types of incidents but also concerns were expressed about the safety and expectations that might be put on first responders. Finally the very few resources available to both the fire science and fire service communities to work together more closely were discussed.

Mike Spearpoint - 17-Oct-2007