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.