NIST

The good stuff is about half way through the video.

Today I took a class at NIST about Fire Dynamics. It was fantastic. NIST has a Fire Fighting Technology Group that does amazing research and live studies of fire. They study fire behavior, methods for more safely and efficiently putting it out, efficacy of protective gear and equipment, etc. My explanation does not do it justice. They are amazing! They have all sorts of fancy equipment and they burn stuff and collect data and try a million different variables and make computer models and take video to learn and understand so many aspects of the fire service.

I have a little crush on them. They can come in after a fire fighter fatality and figure out what exactly happened and why it happened and how to prevent it from happening in the future. They are like CSI of fire - how cool is that!

Anyhow, today they opened up a class to 400 fire fighters and taught us about what they had found out in their research. It was really interesting and helped me better understand the beast that we are called to go up against. Bonus is that they gave us their powerpoint presentation, and like 10 CD's of their research videos to use to train and teach others in the fire service. And did I mention the entire thing was free? A wealth or research and knowledge, ours for free. These guys were great! 

I would hope that we could use their research to change our firefighting tactics a little, the positive pressure ventilation study was really great. But like Josh pointed out today: The fire department prides itself on years of tradition unchanged by innovation (or evolution or something like that). He is right. Remembering that and not being frustrated by it is one of my biggest struggles at work. I just don't understand why, if newer better technology has come along and it is something we can afford, we don't go with that newer better technology. It seems counterintuitive. Why are people so opposed to new things? Anyhow. That is a whole different thing that will never make it to my happy blog page. Because it is not happy. It is lame.

So. The day was really good. The class was so informational. Fire behavior and fire fighting are really interesting as a science.