There's no doubt that SCBA units have come a long way since they first surpassed the Burrell filter masks and ChemOx oxygen breathing apparatus on which the fire service used to rely.

When Chief Robert Rielage of Wyoming (Ohio) Fire-EMS first entered the fire service, he was taught essential skills like buddy breathing and quick cylinder changes. He also remembers the difficulty of using demand masks, which required the user to create negative pressure through breathing to open the valve and allow air to enter the facepiece.

“The other thing that almost sounds archaic now was that we didn't have masks that were dedicated to each individual, so there was no fit testing,” Rielage says. “A mask may come in one size, and we were expecting a guy who was 6'4", 220 pounds, with a full face to take the same mask as the guy who was 5'6" and 130 soaking wet was going to take. So there was a lot of air that was escaping and a lot of seepage of products of combustion back into the system.”

Now SCBA units include positive-pressure masks that are fitted to the individual, making it easier for firefighters to breathe while exerting themselves. Pop-on, high-pressure connections; heads-up displays; and built-in PASS devices also contribute to firefighter safety.

But what could the future hold? Fire Chief asked Rielage for his take on the situation as an everyday chief officer who deals with SCBA on the fireground and in committee.

What do you think about today's biggest buzz-word: interoperability?

Where we came in under some of the more recent natural and terrorist operations, large-scale operations that have been looked at by the federal government, involves interoperability or interchangeability. Dave Paulison, when he was U.S. Fire Administrator, said to us, “You know, we all have all these bottles, but if I can't take a Draeger air bottle and put it on a Survivair, or put a Survivair onto an MSA, or an MSA onto a Scott,” and to a greater or lesser extent that's true.

There have been issues both with harnesses and threads. The big issue with that now, and that's one of the situations where the NFPA standard is being addressed as well, is how to go about and interchange these bottles so that if you get onto an emergency scene we don't have to recreate a supply nightmare of air. It's going to be an interesting question as to how that gets solved….

I'll go back to an historic point. National standard fire hose thread was developed shortly after 1904 at the Baltimore Fire, but it got a lot of play after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire because of the lack of compatibility of threads. I'm told by a friend of mine who's a vendor in the fire-hose business that there's still over 300 individual-type threads across the United States. I know that I deal in a jurisdiction since I'm just north of the city of Cincinnati, where my thread is city of Cincinnati thread because we deal not only so closely in geography, but there are times when they're using my fire hydrants, I'm using their fire hydrants because of our close proximity … so we have always adapted to the Cincinnati standard thread.

What the country has done based on that … is that each of the engines that we have has to have our adapter to national standard … so that if we run into a compatibility problem, say if Dayton has a different standard, then what you do is spin your Dayton thread onto a national standard adapter, we come in, we spin a national standard adapter on too, and then put a Cincinnati standard hose out of it. So what has happened under this big gobbledygook that still exists … is that by having the national standard adapters, we have sort of eliminated the duplicity but at the same time not had to literally uproot thousands of fire hydrants to convert them all over to a national standard.

I sort of see the same thing happening with this interchange problem with bottles. I think that there has to be if we develop a national standard for our air bottles…. We have to give it one of two ways that we go when that standard is developed. Number one is that we ask the federal government under the Department of Homeland Security to literally re-fund everybody's need to completely redo their SCBAs over a period of time, probably five to 10 years minimum just from a production standpoint and all of the manufacturers to maintain that interoperable standard. Or we do something similar to that with new purchases, but we find a way that we're able to adapt those bottles and harnesses and threads, in a less expensive way, [in case] we are called in to a larger-scale operation. For example, we had folks that were down in Mississippi after Katrina…. While we brought our own equipment and we brought our own vehicles we brought everything on our own, we were sort of self-contained there really wasn't a major problem with that based on the fact that we had national standard threads.

I'm thinking that somewhere there has to be that same development and thinking that might be the short-term solution toward the interchange problem with SCBAs, and then a long-term solution as we change out SCBAs over the course of 10 to 15 years in a lifespan, depending on how much service life is left, how many fires that piece of SCBA actually goes to and is utilized that will then have a long-term solution to this interchange problem.

And all of this will be dealt with in the next edition of NFPA 1981, Open-Circuit Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus for Fire and Emergency Services?

I think there is still some room right now because of the delay where people have looked at the standard and said, “You know, there may be some fine-tuning here that we have to do. We might have to do some wiggle room.” I don't know if that's come from the vendors who are asking for more time to do something, or whether that's coming from people like me who are fire chiefs saying they won't have it in their budgets.

To be honest, the last time that we changed out our SCBAs in our total department was in 2002, and a large part of that almost $200,000 came from the federal government in one of the first FEMA grants. So it's understandable that if you're asking us to go up to these standards, once again, there either has to be money available or there has to be time … for us to budget for these things….

I do think that there have been some folks who have looked at this through the comment period and said, “We may have to adjust some things.” Maybe along the lines of what I've talked about: how we can utilize those SCBAs that meet the current SCBA standard and give them a longer life on the apparatus and then find a way to build in either local, state or federal matching dollars … to get them in place during a period of time.

After interchangeability comes interoperability?

There are vendors out there who are doing some things obviously to get ahead of the market on their own that are over and above the interchangeable situation. There's at least one SCBA maker that's looking at, for example, trying to put some sort of tracking device for accountability in their SCBAs. It winds up being a separate radio system from that which may be mobile data computer or whatever that you're utilizing in your command vehicle….

Over and above that, Motorola … is working on a system using global positioning to track an individual's progress within a building, within the four walls. Now, you might say to me, “OK, what does that have to do with SCBA?” Well, the final resolve is that those types of features are eventually going to be placed in the SCBAs, just like the PASS device was a strap-on 15 years ago.… They may be strap-ons in the beginning, but I think that eventually, whether a firefighter wants to or not, it's not going to be a passive device, it's going to be an active device. It's somehow going to wind up being integral, that radio communications in some sort of, whether it's a bone mike or whatever in the mask, the locator built into that radio, and it all being an integral part of the ensemble that the individual is putting on.

So again, what I think is important from an interoperability standpoint, is that as we go forward, that we come up with maybe some sort of oversight group that sets the standard for those. Otherwise, if you go out and buy the first unit that's on the market and I'm not trying to denigrate anybody who's done the R&D to make it happen but you don't won't to wind up with the Beta in a VHS world. And that's one of the issues that I think is truly interoperable whether it's in SCBAs or how the SCBA again becomes an integrated part for overall firefighter safety into what I think is coming down the road in the next five to 10 years easily. Those are the kinds of issues that I think are the true interoperability issues.

I think the interchangeable issue on the short term can be solved, whether or not we come up with a cache of some sort of add-ons to harnesses that allow us either to accommodate a larger bottle, or if it's a smaller bottle than ours uses, like an MSA is a smaller bottle by comparison to a Survivair or a Scott, that we then put some sort of padding in there that holds that bottle in place if that's what we have to use, if the standard is more toward the MSA-type bottle. Whatever that is, I think we can come up with some short-term solutions, and I think that's probably fairly easily affordable if that department is looking at trying to maintain some sort of standards nationally.

But beyond this, to be totally compatible over the next couple of years with the standards that are coming down and the other things that I think will become for the department, 10 years from now, almost second nature that we have these accountability and locator type of devices built in. We need to make sure as they progress that they are progressing so there is interoperability.

Now you might say, “What difference does it make if I have the Motorola version and somebody else has the, you name it, the MSA standard that they built as a standalone?” Well what happens again when we come in either on mutual aid, automatic aid, we pick up and go to Mississippi again because we're being called, not necessarily as a call from federal government but more and more we're seeing calls by state and local governments through the states to be called into situations, and when you do that, there has to be some compatibility or else you've lost your whole accountability in the long run, whether it's in a big setting or a small setting.…

How does the need to mesh accountability with SCBA affect PPE? Having different standards come out at different times makes it harder for all of these elements to work together.

It does. It's one of those situations where the manufacturers are very clear, especially on PPE, to say that they're meeting the 2004 standard or whatever. We have done such a good job in PPE; what we're looking at now is trying to develop the all-purpose garment that we can utilize that has some bio-protection … and not give up the fire protection that's in there. That's a hard thing because every time we tax a manufacturer, they have to get back the research-and-development cost and obviously their cost of production before they even begin to clear a profit. So we're driving up the cost of these things.

There was a time and a place where I used to think that $2,000 would allow me to outfit a firefighter from head to toe. That's not the case anymore. It is becoming closer to double that if you're looking the new standards with SCBA, with PPE, with helmets, with boots, and getting away from the traditional situation. For example, even in boots, as we go more and more toward leather and people say, “Why? That's an extravagance,” but if you can use that same boot as your USAR boot and your fire service boot and your whatever, yes, you're increasing the cost but you're not increasing the redundancy to put that same person into three different types of stationwear.

There's all sorts of factors that weigh into this situation, and you're absolutely right, it would be wonderful to take a snapshot in time and say, “That's PPE that we want to do as of Jan. 1, 2007, and by golly, we're going to be able to make that happen in five years.” And so what happens in five years is we come up with different, better, lighter weight, more durable materials, and the next thing we know is that the 2007 standard is OK, but golly the 2009 is really the Cadillac now….

I don't want to overuse the word “conundrum,” but it's really that sort of dichotomy that's pulling people in both directions. You want people to be safe now, but hey, wait a minute if I wait another year this other standard comes out. And then you have the whole issue of whether or not a whole bunch of materials that meet the former standard get dumped on the market at a really decent price, and you have people who say, OK, I'll compromise and … I can outfit 20 more people for the amount of money I have if I go pick up these garments as opposed to what's coming down the line.…

Is there still more room, or more need for development, for more performance in terms of SCBA, more capacity?

I think each department in each jurisdiction to some degree has to look at what they have in the way of resources, and does their equipment, whether it's SCBA or personal protective equipment, does it meet the style of firefighting that they intend to do? If you are doing aggressive interior firefighting as a standard, as the bread and butter of your department, then you have to look at whether there's other technology that can enhance and aid the survivability of that firefighter if in fact he or she gets themselves in trouble, or circumstances change that are beyond the control of either the firefighter or the incident commander that gets them in trouble?

… I don't think I have the wisdom of Solomon to tell every fire department in the world what they need and what they don't need, but I do think one of the things that we had in the past years that we may not have in the present years is that some of our technology in SCBA we owe to NASA, but we owe to the NASA of 20 years ago when they were developing it for other space missions. When there was that drought in NASA from the standpoint of their R&D, when we've been utilizing relatively the same space shuttle and the same technology and I'm sure there have been refinements and whatever, but there haven't been those huge breakthroughs that developed for us new materials as far as our PPE, lighter weight, longer lasting, more durable SCBAs. A lot of that went into the public domain, maybe with only a little fine-tuning done by the vendors as opposed to a huge amount of R&D. Now I see that anything coming out in firefighter safety from an R&D standpoint is primarily coming out of the R&D of that individual company.

Yes, there may be some benefits that we're getting out of the military still, maybe communications-wise, certainly things that are now almost, they're still good solutions for communications, like the ACU 1000, which has been out now for the better part of seven or eight years but was utilized in the early '90s for the first Desert Shield conflicts in the Middle East to bring interoperability among the services. Now they've done things like secure Internet and secure satellite phones that bring that battlefield coordination much closer. We've not yet seen those kinds of things come into everyday firefighting. We may see them on some of the big issues, like the next Katrina, or we may see them in the next situation if we have a large-scale terrorist attack. But we don't see it trickling down in the same R&D that I think we did as a benefit in the late '70s, '80s and maybe into the early '90s that we've seen from just government R&D.

SmartDock Offers Hands-Free Hold

In the past year, the NFPA 1901, Automotive Fire Apparatus, committee has been deliberating a proposal to ban SCBA from fire apparatus cabs. Supporters of the proposal say firefighters would struggle less with their seatbelts getting entangled with the straps on the SCBA holder and thus would be more likely to wear their seatbelts. They also contend that removing SCBAs from the cabs eliminates the potential danger of flying cylinders in the event of a collision.

On the flip side, some say that placing SCBAs in high side compartments slows down firefighters as they move from seat to scene. They also argue that if the SCBA is removed from the seat, firefighters who are unaware of safety concerns may carry this equipment loosely in their cabs, resulting in a serious safety problem.

LifeGuard Technologies is addressing both sides of this issue with a new piece of equipment available in March. SmartDock is a hands-free SCBA holder for fire apparatus. This strap-free docking station offers single-motion SCBA insertion and instant hands-free release when the firefighter rises out of the seat. In the event of a collision, inertial forces cause the top jaws to lock securely around the SCBA, retaining the cylinder and preventing it from becoming a dangerous projectile.

SmartDock adjusts to accommodate SCBAs of various makes and models and has undergone extensive testing to meet or exceed industry standards. When evaluated to NFPA 1901, SmartDock passed deceleration testing of 30Gs, more than three times the minimum required 9G release force.

SmartDock is currently available exclusively on Pierce fire apparatus and in the after market through Pierce Aftermarket Parts.