January 2008
Thermal Imagers Can Save Firefighters Lives
By Ed Ballam
When Bill Taylor was a firefighter with the Newton Abbott Volunteer Fire Department in New York, he had the terrifying experiences of falling through a burned out floor and having a ceiling collapse on him.
“We were fairly aggressive in our firefighting,” Taylor said. “We did things and went places that maybe we shouldn’t have. I guess I was one of those young Turks with a leather helmet and a smooth bore nozzle.”
When Taylor became chief of that department, he had opportunity to work with a thermal imaging camera. It was 1997, and applying infrared technology to firefighting was a fledgling industry.
“I said to my deputy at the time that by hook or crook, we were going to have one,” said Taylor. He saw the unique advantages of TICs and their usefulness in keeping firefighters safe. “That really prompted me to get one,” he said. “No one outside of New York City had one.”
The camera vendor gave the Taylor a camera, held the bill and Taylor did a full-court press to get department members to embrace the technology and then raise the money to pay for it.
“For us, it just makes a lot of sense,” said Taylor, who is now a fire prevention specialist with the New York State Office of Fire Prevention & Control and an instructor with the New York State Academy of Fire Science in Montour Falls, N.Y. “If you’re going to do interior work you really have got to have a camera.”
Thermal imaging cameras are arguably one of the top pieces of equipment that have revolutionized the way firefighters work, ranking right up there with hoses and turnout gear.
Brad Harvey, thermal imaging product manager, from Bullard, a maker of TICs based in Cynthiana, Ky., said the imagers give firefighters the sense of sight in smoke.
“First, we had hose, and that replaced buckets,” said Harvey, who was a career firefighter in Ohio before joining Bullard. “Then we had pumps, and that made it easier to get water to the fire. Then we had turnout gear, which allowed us to get closer to the fire.
Then, it was SCBAs, which allowed us to get inside burning buildings and breathe. Now, we have thermal imaging cameras that allow us to see.”
For Brad Kays, vice president of marketing and business development for ISG, said the technology is all about keeping firefighters safe.
“Our biggest push is keeping firefighters safe,” said Kays. “The key focus for ISG is to provide the highest quality images at the highest temperatures possible.”
In 1998 ISG became one of the first companies to make TICs for use in the fire service. One of the founders and owners, Charles Humpoletz, invented the first thermal imaging camera for the fire service in the early 1990s.
Robert Athanas has been in the fire service longer than thermal imagers, but he’s one of their biggest proponents as the president and one of the founders of SAFE-IR, a non-profit company dedicated to providing thermal imaging training for the fire service nationwide.
Athanas has more than 30 years in the fire service and has been a firefighter with the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) for more than 20 years. He is also a senior instructor with SAFE-IR, a New York State certified instructor as well as a Hands On Training (H.O.T.) instructor with the Fire Department Instructors Conference (FDIC), having lectured and trained thousands in TIC operations.
“A fire is a lot like a jigsaw puzzle,” Athanas said. “Some of the pieces are easy to see and fit together easily, but a lot of the pieces are not that easy to spot. A thermal imager is a tool that may be able to assist you with finding the other pieces of the puzzle and help you put things together quicker.”
The term thermal imaging camera is somewhat of a misnomer as they are more sensors than cameras.
On the front of a thermal imager are sensors that react to infrared energy from objects in front of it. The infrared energy passes through smoke and fog, unlike visible light and the imager converts the thermal signature to a visible image interpreted on a video monitor.
An electronic device, known in the thermal imaging industry as an engine, converts the thermal signature to the image on the monitor. Hotter objects appear white, and cooler objects appear black. Many camera makers have enhancements that provide color images to indicate temperature. Yellow and red images appear on the monitor to indicate hotter temperatures relative to surrounding objects. For example, the seat of a fire often shows red and the less hot areas in the immediate area show yellow, depending on the camera manufacturer.
Prices Fall Dramatically
Cameras for the fire service are made by companies like ISG and Bullard, as well as Total Fire Group, which offers a helmet-mounted micro imager, MSA, Scott Health & Safety, Dräger and a variety of other smaller manufacturers.
Prices range from around $7,000 to $12,000, with most experts agreeing that very good cameras are available in the $10,000 range. The prices have fallen dramatically in the past several years from the $20,000 to $25,000 price tag when they were first made available to firefighters. At the current cost, some departments have found sufficiently economic to equip each apparatus with the tool.
Athanas likes the term tool when referring to thermal imagers. He said TICs are tools that help keep firefighters safe.
“For firefighter safety, first and foremost, thermal imagers are good tools for accountability,” said Athanas, noting that many departments have passive accountability with the use of personnel tags collected from firefighters on the scene. “We all have reactive accountability with the tag system,” he said. “With a thermal imager, we can have active accountability. Simply by looking around in a building, you can see whether you have everybody or if someone is missing.”
If the unthinkable happens, said Taylor, the instructor from Montour Falls, a thermal imager can become “the primary tool” for rapid intervention teams (RIT) who will go in and try to rescue a missing or downed firefighter.
“A RIT team can also watch conditions with a camera and look for things the incident commander might not see,” Taylor said. He added that thermal imagers are also good for scene size up and can be used to help find the seat of the fire, the fire spread and help read the smoke plume – all good things to know before making a decision to send firefighters in.
In an ideal world, there would be at least two cameras at every scene, Taylor said, one inside and one outside.
“For interior work, you’ve got to have a camera,” Taylor said.
He related a story about a City of Oneida firefighter who was critically injured in a bowling alley fire in June. That firefighter suffered severe burns and lost an arm after the ceiling collapsed on him during an interior attack.
Taylor said a camera might have foretold the dangers of entering the building and provided clear warnings that firefighters were in the untenable situation of having fire overhead.
“It’s a really tough thing,” Taylor said. “You don’t know exactly what happened, but a camera may have helped.”
Sensing Collapses
Harvey, the Bullard spokesman, is convinced that thermal imagers help save lives, not only of firefighters, but of occupants who may be trapped in burning buildings
As a career firefighter himself, Harvey has seen his share of fires. A camera not only provides sight in smoke and fog, but with temperature sensing abilities, it can indicate when collapse is imminent. It can show gusset plates heated to the point of failure, deformity of roofs and ceilings and holes in floors where fire has burned through.
“It can also help you find secondary means of egress,” Harvey said.
But, to Harvey, the biggest benefit of thermal imagers is reducing the amount of time firefighters are exposed to situations immediately dangerous to life of health (IDLH).
“If you reduce the time of exposure in a risky environment, you reduce the chances for injury,” he said.
Time and time again in training situations, Harvey said recruits and trainees are twice as likely to find possible fire victims with a camera. Firefighters have a 40 percent chance of finding victims without a camera compared to 99 percent with a camera, he said.
Need For Training
“And they are 75 percent more effective, taking only five minutes to find victims compared to 20 minutes,” Harvey said. “If I call a ‘mayday,’ I want them there as soon as possible. Five minutes may be survivable. Twenty minutes may not be.”
Athanas, the spokesman for SAFE-IR, is quick to point out that thermal imagers are tools. “And with all tools, you need training to fully understand how they’re used and to get the most out of them,” he said. “There’s more to thermal imaging training that changing the batteries.”
SAFE-IR has 18 instructors coast-to-coast teaching firefighters how to use their individual brands of cameras. While all cameras on the market are good and will do the job, they don’t all work the same, said Athanas. Sometimes, even the models available within a brand name operate differently, he added.
Athanas said SAFE-IR offers a two-day course which involves classroom work the first day and live fire training the next, either in an acquired structure for burning or at an academy burn facility, depending on what the department has available. Training for both days is about $3,000. Information about the non-profit organization can be found at www.safe-ir.com.
Class sizes are limited because Athanas said he and his instructors like to provide one-on-one training in the burn building. “We have to teach them to interpret what they are seeing on the video screen,” he said.
The Best Image Possible
Brad Kays, the spokesman from ISG, agrees with Athanas and said a camera is “no different than any other tool” in a firefighter’s arsenal. That’s why ISG, like other manufacturers, supports the work of SAFE-IR and recommends the training for its customers.
From a manufacturer’s point of view, Kays said ISG’s mission is to provide crisper, sharper images at higher temperatures with the objective to help firefighters discern what they’re looking at as quickly as possible. He said firefighters need to be able to scan a room quickly and determine whether the furniture in it is off-gassing, signaling a flashover is possible, whether anyone is in a room and when cooling efforts with nozzles and water application is effective.
“We’ve got guys going into some pretty violent conditions, and we want to give them the best image possible so they can see what they’re getting into and get out before it’s too late,” Kays said.
Athanas said he is routinely asked which cameras are best.
“Everyone out there makes a good camera, so I will never make a recommendation on which one to buy, but I will recommend you need to get one,” he said.
Most thermal imagers use different color schemes to designate temperatures. Through temperature contrasts, firefighters can see human forms and the seat of the fire.
Thermal imaging cameras can be used to assess scene safety before entering a building by interpreting venting, heat, and smoke conditions. (Bullard Photo)