Issue 84 - January 2023

Don’t let small fires grow

During November 2022, COP27 took place in Egypt with 45,000 delegates from 194 countries attempting to reach consensus on what to do about the threat to our planet from global warming. However, with all this good intent the warning from Simon Stiell made me think about what our industry is doing to assist in the fight against climate change.

Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, reminded delegates in the closing plenary that the world is in a critical decade for climate action. A stark report from UN Climate Change underpinned his remarks, as well as discussions throughout the two-week COP27 conference. According to the report, implementation of current pledges by national governments put the world on track for a 2.5°C warmer world by the end of the century. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicates that greenhouse gas emissions must decline 45% by 2030 to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

What I found was heartening, all fire services I surveyed had made commitments to reducing their carbon footprint. In a couple of cases, agencies had set a carbon-neutral target – although detail on how they were going to get there was hard to find.

My contention in this editorial is that agencies cannot do this alone, it’s a four-way interaction between the agencies, equipment manufacturers, the built environment and the natural environment. The built and natural environments reduce their carbon footprint if we extinguish the fire early or even better if they don’t get started.

It’s the relationship between agencies and equipment manufacturers that intrigues me. Have you noticed how power tools are all becoming battery powered – no more power cables to the generator screaming away in the background being fed petrol, just a change of battery from the battery pack in your truck. The R&D that went into the conversion of these tools, especially the extraction tool, was massive. But, although it was mainly developed for the building industry it took firefighters a very short time to see the operational benefits first, with the decrease in carbon output being a welcome secondary outcome.

The same thing is happening in fire trucks. As a consequence of the trucking industry moving towards electric vehicles, I’m seeing at fire exhibitions more and more fire trucks emerging from the new generation of electric cab chassis now on the market.

I am also seeing new standing orders being developed on how to best manage electric vehicles and battery equipment on scene at large fires. An example would be where at a major fire we normally have three or four trucks pumping and many trucks that sit on the sidelines after delivering their crews to the incident. These supplementary fire trucks become your back-up batteries only needing a cable connection, this is a totally different concept to the way we top up fuel tanks today.

The world is changing around us, and we will be pushed along by the many industries that are changing to meet global warming goals. All we have to do is make sure that when purchasing equipment, carbon policies are at the front of mind when there is a high carbon cheaper choice.

This should not stop the front-line operators (firefighters) from pointing out where they see benefits to be acquired should they identify carbon wastage.

This is going the long way round to point out that wildfires and building fires have, by a long way, the greatest impact on climate control within the fire services. All the technology I have spoken about pales into insignificance if one fire is not controlled. The centuries-old process of putting the wet stuff on the hot stuff is now not good enough. We need to do more (and I don’t mean more fuel-reduction burns).

I see millions of dollars being spent on resilience, communication, fire modelling, drones and other equipment. But I don’t see millions of dollars for new ways of containing the fire to the point of origin; that is where the greatest carbon savings will occur.

For more information, email neil.bibby@apfmag.com