Fire Related Research and Developments (RE17)

Professional Development

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Fire Related Research and Developments (RE17)

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Now in its 21st year, the only event focused on fire-related research and development returned to West Midlands Fire Service HQ on November 9. FIRE Correspondent Catherine Levin reports on an eclectic range of research with delegates attending from across the fire sector and from many academic institutions

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ire Related Research and Developments (RE17) is run by the Institution of Fire Engineers and convened by Dr Anne Eyre from Trauma Training and Dr Rowena Hill from Nottingham Trent University. They both have extensive experience of working with fire and rescue services.

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Understanding and Addressing Preventable Fire Deaths Steve Ash is a Group Manager in Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service. His presentation was the first of two papers looking at different aspects of fire prevention. Steve looked at fire deaths over three years in Hampshire. He wanted to understand the extent to which they were inevitable.

He looked back at research that is now ten years old from Greenstreet Berman that sought to identify the factors that lead to fire fatalities.

He had access to fire data, but what is unusual about his approach was the access he secured to social care data. He was able to shadow front line social care staff to

understand their structures and approaches. At one point he was able to view the social care records of those who died in fires to identify their vulnerabilities and match what he already knew from fire data.

All fire and rescue services in England have access to the NHS England Exeter dataset (there was a separate presentation about the use of big data using the Exeter dataset as an example). The dataset includes the gender, age, address of everyone over 65 registered with a GP. It does not contain names, so is limited in its value. For Steve to get access to highly confidential social care records for the purposes of this research was very unusual and provided him with great insight into vulnerability and fire.

Through his work he was also exposed to the work of the Adult Safeguarding Board and was influential in getting fire deaths added as a key performance indicator.

The second presentation in this track focused on how people make sense of domestic fires. In previous years, the research event has heard about the progress of the LIFEBID

“The winner stood out as an example of a research project that has used new technology to advance hazard awareness testing in a world first and is making it available to all fire services free of charge” www.fire–magazine.com | January 2018 | 53

“Over the last 11 years the FIRE Magazine/Gore Research Excellence Award has encouraged and promoted continued research in the sector, the results of which improve safety for firefighters and the communities they serve”

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Two presenters travelled from Sweden and Poland. It is great to see so many organisations working on fire-related research and sharing it at this event.

Some presenters like Phil Butler from Cardiff University and Bill Gough from Coventry University had spoken at previous research event gatherings and shared progress in their own research areas.

Many of the presenters put themselves forward for consideration for the FIRE Magazine/Gore Research Excellence Award 2017. This is presented to the most captivating research project. One of the key criteria for this award is that the research has practical application and can make a difference to service delivery within a fire context.

This year’s award went to researchers at the Nottingham Trent University for their presentation ‘Assessing hazard perception and decision-making skills of fire commanders in an emergency response drive situation’.

First presented at RE15, this project is now complete.

The researchers, David Crundall, Victoria Kroll and Mark Jarman, provided an update on their work that they described as “the first attempt to create a fire-appliance hazard perception/prediction test in the world”.

In order to better target training needs in fire appliance drivers, the researchers created a series of hazard tests.

Seven HD cameras recorded footage from appliances on blue-light training runs. The footage was synchronised and edited into a graphic overlay of the cab interior, providing highly immersive clips of fire appliance driving.

Fire and rescue service driving instructors then helped select clips from the footage containing the hazards. From this the tests were created. The first was focused on hazard perception and the second on hazard prediction. David demonstrated the tests and talked about the statistical evidence that the hazard prediction test can discriminate between safe and less-safe drivers.

The plan is to release these tests free of charge to all fire and rescue services across the UK via a web-based platform to allow instructors to use these materials in their training and assessment. This work was funded by a grant from the Fire Services Research and Training Trust (see pg 56). It is a good example how funding from the Trust can result in practical solutions for areas of work that affect all fire and rescue services. More information about the Trust can be found at: www.firetrust.info.

Presenting the award alongside FIRE Editor Andrew Lynch, Gore Association Graham Dobson said: “This is the 11th year of the award and the quality of submissions was once again consistently very high. The winner stood out as an example of a research project that has used new technology to advance hazard awareness testing in a world first and is making it available to all fire services free of charge. It will be of measurable benefit to firefighter and public safety.

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project. Run by Kent Fire and Rescue Service, this project sought to understand how people behave in fires and resulted in a relatively small data collection from which further research can be developed.

The presentation by Andrew Clark from the University of Salford revealed a snapshot of how people feel about fires that occur in their own homes and in particular their embarrassment. At one point, Andrew said that his interviewees believed that “fires just happen”. The people he spoke to thought that they were victims and did not always associate their own behaviours with the consequences.

Some of the older people who were interviewed said that they did not want to admit to anyone that a fire had happened in their home for fear of their own vulnerability being re-examined by family members or others. The fear of being forced into a care setting was high.

Andrew’s work was focused on a small cohort of only 46 and took place before the Grenfell Tower fire. It would be interesting to re-run the research with people who have experienced a house fire since June 2017. Would the results be different? Has Grenfell sharpened people’s fear of fire and led to them increasing their own understanding about fire safety or changed behaviour in any way? That is probably something for a larger, longer term study, but Andrew’s presentation provided much food for thought.

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Addressing Fire-related Risk Environments Building fire safety featured in another presentation from Naiane Esteve who works for Arup. She talked about green facades, the sometimes rather beautiful walls of flowers and greenery more commonly seen in warmer climes, but also appear in the UK. Naiane is interested in the combustibility and fire spread through green facades.

Her desktop research indicated that there is very limited information on the fire performance of green walls. She told delegates that current regulations, guidance and documentation related to green roofs and walls do not address fire safety in detail. One of Naiane’s examples was the Rubens at the Palace Hotel living wall in Victoria, central London. It reaches 21 metres high, hosts over 10,000 plants and uses 16 tonnes of soil. The time lapse video of its construction is well worth a look.

It is early days for Naiane’s research, but there are clearly different angles of interest for the Fire and Rescue Service, particularly considering the method of construction, the risk of collapse and the fit with national operational guidance.

Research Excellence Awards These are just a few examples of the 24 presentations from the day. Presenters came from many different universities, including Salford, Edinburgh, Leeds, Glasgow, Nottingham Trent, Cardiff, Coventry, Gloucestershire and East Anglia.

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Professional Development

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This year’s FIRE Magazine/Gore Research Excellence Award for Best Presentation went to David Crundall (pictured holding the award), Victoria Kroll and Mark Jarman from Nottingham Trent University for their presentation ‘Assessing hazard perception and decision-making skills of fire commanders in an emergency response drive situation’. The Best Poster winner went to Dr Merle Missoweit (pictured holding the award) for ‘FIRE-IN’, a fire and rescue innovation network including partners from across Europe. The winners are flanked by Gore Associate Graham Dobson and FIRE Editor Andrew Lynch

to improve service delivery, the project can then provide an evidence-based approach to requesting funding from the EU for research. The end of the cycle then allows for review and evaluation before moving on to a second and third cycle. The project expects these three cycles to reveal common capability gaps and the means by which research and development can help fill them in the longer term.

This is a really interesting project and speaks to the issue raised at RE16 where FIRE considered the position of fire-related research in the UK and bemoaned the demise of fire-related research from government and any central home for it.

Does FIRE-IN represent an opportunity for the UK to get involved and share its work in areas of research interest to influence and benefit from this pan European approach?

Given there is no central fire-related research body or function in the UK, this might be hard but there are plenty of organisations like the IFE, NFCC, FPA and others who may consider contacting Merle and getting involved.

Yet again, the research event throws up all sorts of interesting work going on in organisations across the UK and beyond. It is not just an event for researchers, it is a good day out of the office to sit and listen; learn and reflect about topics close to home and more esoteric. It is certainly a must for anyone wanting to develop their knowledge and understanding of new and emerging research across the Fire and Rescue Service.

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“At Gore we are committed to supporting the development of new ideas on innovation in the UK Fire Service and over the last 11 years the FIRE Magazine/ Gore Research Excellence Award has encouraged and promoted continued research in the sector, the results of which improve safety for firefighters and the communities they serve.”

The FIRE Magazine/Gore Research Excellence Award 2017 is also awarded to the best poster. This year the award went to the FIRE-IN project. This is a new five-year project funded under the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme.

FIRE-IN is the fire and rescue innovation network and includes partners drawn from France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Poland, Sweden, Greece and the Czech Republic.

The UK is not a partner in the project, but the project team is keen to involve expertise from the UK and other countries in the EU. Dr Merle Missoweit represented the project at RE17 and explained that the purpose of the project is to identify capability gaps in Fire and Rescue Service delivery using a multi-agency approach. Using a five-stage cycle, the project plans to define operational needs – the capability gap – search for ideas and solutions through interaction between industry, academia and policy makers and work out what research and development is required to fill those gaps.

By taking this multi-agency and multi-country approach to determining what research and development is required

www.fire–magazine.com | January 2018 | 55