Mask Maintenance Can Save Lives
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The Editor’s Opinion Page
Any piece of equipment carried and used by a fire department requires regular care and maintenance. This is particularly true of self-contained breathing apparatus on which a fire fighter’s life can often depend. Yet an investigative team recently discovered SCBAs that showed accumulations of dirt and hair in facepieces. Worse, the unit also had missing and defective parts.
These SCBAs, incidentally, were in regular service—not on a shelf—and worn apparently with the utmost confidence by the fire fighters to which they were assigned. How this attutude can prevail defies reason.
Unlike a hook or an ax which requires only a cleaning and sharpening, a SCBA is an intricate and somewhat delicate piece of equipment on whose maintenance a life can, and often does, depend. From the day of its arrival in a shining new case it should receive the care and attention that a newborn baby gets.
In an efficient fire department, a new mask will be assigned a number and an inspection card which will carry its history—use, inspection, repair, damage, etc.—until the day it is retired. Inspection, of course, will he done frequently and regularly, and particularly after every use at a fire or an emergency. Any repairs required should be promptly made.
Training in the use of breathing equipment is something like maintenance in that it should be done on a frequent and regular basis. Every man in a department should be able to don a mask automatically, even reflexively. But this is not all. He should know the limitations of his mask not only in time but in place—a mask gives no protection in searing heat. He should be aware, too, of the buddy system—never enter a dangerous atmosphere alone.
Training, however, goes beyond the use of breathing equipment by the individual fire fighter. There have been instances where men have gone into a building and never come out alive—usually because they had exceeded the time limit of their tank of air either through carelessness or by being trapped.
Who is to blame? We say the company officer. Or if the company officer is one of the victims, then the chief or other fireground commander who sent them in. Someone on the outside must be constantly aware of the number of men within a building—who they are and where they are. This someone must also be aware of the 30-minute limitation of an air tank—and start worrying and doing something about it when men are in a dangerous atmosphere for more than 20 minutes. To do less is criminal.
So let’s remember that breathing apparatus when properly used and maintained is the most important piece of equipment carried by a fire department. First and foremost because it protects the life and health of a fire fighter. Second, it speeds rescue operations at fires and other emergencies. And third, it permits a rapid attack on the seat of a fire that cuts losses.
