November/December 2007

Another Company Attempts To  Perfect An SCBA Escape Filter

By Lyn Bixby

An emergency escape filter fitted to an air mask is credited, over a five-year span, for saving the lives of three Los Angeles firefighters who ran out of air. But that success turned to failure in 2006 with the product being recalled and the manufacturer going out of business.

Since that time, Los Angeles Assistant Fire Chief Don Frazeur, who runs the department’s supply and maintenance division, has been looking for something similar. In late September he traveled across the country to Hamden, Conn., to witness a live-burn test of a new filter that is expected to be on the market in the coming year.

“It doesn’t generate oxygen,” he said, “so if you’re in an oxygen-deficient atmosphere, it’s not going to help you. It’s just going to keep you from ingesting the carbon monoxide and the acrolein and cyanide and things like that.”

The Connecticut test established that there was enough oxygen to sustain life in the burning building, and the results generated a lot of excitement among the people who developed the filter, as well as the firefighters who tried it out.

“I’m hungry for a replacement,” Frazeur said. “I think they proved the validity of the product, but there are still questions that have to be answered, namely how do they package it so that a firefighter can deploy it while wearing wet firefighting gloves.”

Packaging appears to have been a factor in the recall of the first filter, which was made by Brookdale International Systems, Inc. of Vancouver, British Columbia, and was sold under the names EVACpro and Survivair Smoke Eater. While the Brookdale product worked, its shelf life was limited because moisture diminished the filter’s effectiveness, according to Frazeur and others.

The new product, the Last Chance Rescue Filter made by Essex PB&R of St. Louis, Mo., uses a different kind of filter than the Brookdale product and is packaged differently.

“The whole key is to keep this unit dry until it’s time for use,” said Dave Hurley, vice president of operations at Essex. “We’ve been in this business for 15 years, we serve the military and the commercial airline market, and everything is vacuum-sealed in a tear-resistant, vapor-resistant pouch.”

Hurley, who is also a volunteer firefighter, described the Connecticut test results as unbelievable. “I was in the building and I saw firsthand how well these filters worked,” he said. “I just think it’s a necessity. The hardest thing to teach people is it’s not to be used for extra time. It’s to be used for escape-only, one-time use.”

Concern About Misuse

Hurley and Frazeur are adamant on that point. Apprehension that an escape-only filter could be used inappropriately by firefighters in place of an SCBA or to try to extend time inside a burning building is expected to be a factor in how quickly the new product is accepted.

“We look at this as strictly as a no-other-alternative resource instead of a well-let’s-go-in-light-and-quick type thing,” Frazeur said. “That was the fear I heard from a number of fire chiefs across the country, expressing concern that that’s how it would be used.”

To guard against having the Brookdale filters used for anything except emergency escapes, Frazeur said the Los Angeles Fire Department adopted a letter-writing policy.

Letter-Writing Policy

“I made it so that any time they deployed it, they would have to write a letter to get it replaced and describe the circumstances of use,” he said. “Of course that would discourage use except for those situations where it was truly life or death… One thing firefighters universally hate is to have to write a letter.”

One firefighter who has written a lot of letters and has an intense interest in the new filter is Eric George. He was a volunteer firefighter for 10 years, has been a member of the New Haven (Conn.) Fire Department for more than 20 years and holds the key patent on the device, although he has not tested it himself.

He said he got the idea for the filter in the early 1990s, almost a decade after manufacturers began mounting regulators for self contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) on the masks.

“When the SCBA used to have the regulator down on your hip, you had a corrugated hose going from your mask to that regulator, and they used to teach you if you ran out of air to stick it in your coat or a glove,” he said. “So I was thinking that there has to be some type of filter that can snap on in place of the regulator.”

He said he put his idea on paper and tried to work through an invention company, which went out of business without accomplishing anything for him. Then he found a patent attorney and finally in 1996 he was awarded U.S. patent number 5562092 for a “firefighter’s emergency smoke filter” that could be mounted on the air mask by removing the regulator.

“I came up with the concept and needed a manufacturer to design it and put it together,” he said. “I wrote to about 100 different manufacturers before it was picked up by [Brookdale].”

Brookdale, which was affiliated with Dupont and made EVAC-U8 and EVAC+ emergency escape smoke hoods, developed the filter under a license agreement with George and produced it until the company issued a “suspend use” advisory in March 2006. The recall of Brookdale’s smoke hoods and filters quickly followed and was announced in cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which said the no injuries had been reported.

In the safety and recall notices, Brookdale said tests had confirmed that its products could fail to work properly, exposing users to harmful levels of carbon monoxide that could lead to serious injury or death. Refunds were offered to owners of the smoke hoods and filters.

After Brookdale shut down operations, Essex PB&R purchased many of the company’s assets, including the company’s intellectual property. Essex signed a new exclusive license agreement with George this spring to produce the Last Chance filter.

“The Eric George patent is the key because he is the only one who has the ability to hook any type of filter up to an SCBA adapter,” said Hurley, the Essex vice president. “Nobody else can put an adapter to an SCBA mask. That’s the way the patent reads.”

Recruiting For The Test

Frank Ricci, a New Haven firefighter who has been working with George for several years to promote his filter idea, said Brookdale discovered the problem with its products while laboratory testing filters in preparation for a live-burn test that Ricci was trying to arrange in conjunction with Yale University School of Medicine. That planned test, he said, would have been similar to the live-burn testing that was conducted on the Last Chance filter in Connecticut in September with Yale participating.

Ricci, a safety advocate who is director of fire services for the private Connecticut Council on Occupational Safety and Health (ConnectiCOSH), recruited firefighters from a number of major cities around the country to participate in testing the Essex product. “Yale School of Medicine in conjunction with the Hamden Fire Department and ConnectiCOSH will conduct a study on hydrogen cyanide, oxygen and carbon monoxide while investigating the feasibility of a new escape technology for firefighters who face out-of-air emergency while operating at a structure fire,” he wrote in a letter to prospective participants.

“Yale will monitor the firefighters and use a new breathalyzer to measure blood gases.”

More than a dozen firefighters tested the filters this fall, including Ricci, who said he became the first person – and the only one so far – to do a Last Chance filter changeover in an IDLH (immediately dangerous to life or health) environment.

“I was the first one in,” he said. “I removed my regulator after running out of air and put in my Last Chance respirator. When I did it, I believe the hydrogen cyanide in the room was around 30 [parts per million] and the carbon monoxide was around 1,000.”

Yale plans to publish the results of the testing as a study, according to Ricci, who said one of the objectives was to measure the amount of oxygen in the burning building because a firefighter using the Last Chance filter, which converts carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide, needs some oxygen to survive. The oxygen measurements were taken near the floor.

“We were going to pull everybody out if the oxygen went below 20 percent,” he said, “and we never had to pull anybody out. You had a couple of low spots for five seconds or so and then it would go back up.”

The firefighters participating in the test each stayed in the building with filters on their masks for 10 to 12 minutes, he said.

“The human subject testing performed better than the [laboratory] tests,” Hurley said. “Some guys were at rest. Some guys were working their butts off, just to try different scenarios to see how well it performed, and it was unbelievable.”

Ricci estimated the Yale study may not be published for a year, but he said he has the same data and is going to use it to try to get some kind of approval for the Last Chance filter from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He is being paid as a consultant to Essex.

Both Ricci and Hurley said the company does not need approval from OSHA or any other agency to sell the Last Chance filter, but company officials decided it would be the best way to proceed before putting it on the market.

“We’re trying to go through all the proper steps so we can bring this technology to the forefront,” Ricci said. “The quickest way to get everybody to take a stance on this is to bring it to an independent third party, and who better to bring it to than OSHA.”

Hurley said he does not know how long the process will take, but he said interest in the Last Chance filter is already overwhelming.

“I have got literally hundreds of requests for quotes from our Web site,” he said. “But we’re just telling everybody, we’re going through the OSHA channels, and once it’s available, we’ll re-contact everybody.”

Building Adapters

He said Essex has built adapters for Last Chance filters to fit the masks of what he described as “the four big players in the SCBA market” – Scott, MSA, Sperian (formerly Survivair) and Dräger.

Hurley said his company has also been talking with representatives of Interspiro, which has a more challenging SCBA to connect to the filter. Unlike most competing products, Interspiro’s regulator is part of the mask and cannot be removed. Its SCBA has a coupling between the regulator and the hose.

“We have a different strategy,” said Interspiro President Mike Brookman. “It’s a proprietary strategy right now. But we’re in discussions with [Essex], and we will have a means to attach [the Last Chance filter] in what we think is a safer and better way.”

Brookman said Interspiro’s proprietary approach provides a transition from SCBA-supplied air to the filter without exposure to the toxic atmosphere typical in a burning building.

As for the cost of the Last Chance filter, George said it is expected to be priced at just under $200, about the same as the Brookdale unit.

‘I’ll Do Pretty Well’

George, who gets royalties from sales of the filters, said the product is drawing a lot more attention now than when Brookdale had the license to produce it, and he is not sure why.

Could his patent make him wealthy? “The potential is there to make a lot of sales,” he said, “and there’s so much interest right now, I’m sure I’ll do pretty well.”

Frazeur, who is in charge of purchasing for the LAFD, said his department is close to going out to bid for new SCBA equipment and he plans to include the filter as an option. His department has roughly 3,600 firefighters, and he said he would like to outfit each one with a filter or at least have one filter for each on-duty position to be swapped around.

He said his main purpose in going to Connecticut was to find out whether the live burn test would be conducted with a scientific approach, and he liked what he saw.

“They monitored the environment that the firefighters were in, they took a baseline reading before they went in on several toxic products of combustion and then they monitored after coming out,” he said. “It doesn’t tell me the capacity of that filter for specific products, but it does tell me that when in a measured toxic environment for a period of time, it works.”

For information go to www.lastchancefilter.com.