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okay here we go welcome everyone i think a lot of people are going to be popping on as we get this conversation going but welcome to the happy hour this installment we're going to be talking a little bit about the basement fire project my name is seth barker first vice president of isfsi and it's happy hour kind of gained momentum from uh not being able to meet up during our social for fdic this year so we kind of harnessed this little platform here to have a discussion every other week and some topics out there and kind of promote what's coming down the pipeline and also just to talk about what's relevant in the industry i hope everybody is safe and healthy when they're on this call here you know we've had a pretty big scare out and here my hometown we've been having the opposite trend that seems like everybody else has been having whereas we're uh we're slamming through the roof with this whole cover deal so it's been pretty scary in our organization we had about 30 exposure to our our members so um unprecedented times right but today we have uh commissioner thiel and dan majkowski talking about the the recent project that seems like it just happened but it was actually started many many years ago and uh it's kind of come to fruition here with our with our in-person delivery and our online delivery that you can access through uh the ul platform and i think i would like to pass it on to uh commissioner teal here and we'll get the party started so thanks for being here great thanks seth and uh thank you all for for joining us today for happy hour uh the only thing missing of course is a is a drink but for those of you who can you know please do i'm gonna start with just a few slides here for context and then uh i think you know dan can pick up from there however seth wants but i think this will be uh kind of set the stage a little bit for the the conversation this is a deck that i presented it's actually bigger than what you're going to see here but i'm just going to show a couple slides this is actually something we presented to our city council today in some budget hearings but i think it will set the stage a little bit about philadelphia about our challenges and then there's kind of a personal aspect that ties right into the basement fire project we're going to be talking about today so let me make sure i can make this work you know this is us this was our fiscal year 2020 i won't read those numbers to you needless to say very busy operating environment very urban are probably most of our residential dwellings are actually row houses that were built in the mid 1800s we've never had a great fire here so i tell people we've kind of we kind of do it one day at a time so again you can see a lot of fire duty a lot of ems a lot of everything going on and uh about 3 000 very dedicated firefighters medics uh and support staff who make all this happen uh you can see and actually there's a map behind me too that has structure fires on it a lot of these dots are overlapping but we do have a lot of fires and uh i would say you know by our definition we do seven or eight you know actual working fires room and contents or more every day 24 7 and then of course we also count like everybody else does we count other structure fires according to nfpa definitions we also regrettably have a lot of fire fatalities and you know you can see some of those plotted some of those are multiple fire fatalities we're actually up we had one december 1st i guess that was yesterday yesterday morning i started out in west philly where thankfully we were able to rescue two children but our folks despite trying uh you know pretty intense fire couldn't get in to uh to get their mother in time you know burglar bars a lot of things old row house had been chopped up into apartments so that actually this hasn't been updated to reflect that uh that additional 30th fatality for the year to date so far uh you can see uh our fire fatality rate uh so far this year is pretty tragic and again that's despite the best efforts of our folks a lot of work a lot of effort and we've had a lot of reinvestment in the fire department here over the past four and a half years you'll see a slide for that this is some of the discussion that we're having with city council about the economic impact of fires you can see there this one is updated to today with 30 fire deaths it's not updated we really have to update this almost every day this morning we had another fire just kind of in in center city here in philadelphia uh were able to rescue two people and then transported three to the hospital total uh treated by our medics so that fire-related injuries number is up and another kind of way of looking at this the family's displaced we've had 734 that number i haven't updated yet for today 734 families displaced in home fires this year in philadelphia it's more than 2 000 people 2 164 people burned out of their homes this year so far in philly so again this is all despite the great efforts of our our firefighters uh you can see there that's a that's a restaurant fire one of the things we're talking to folks about is the the impact of this on business particularly small business that restaurant fire actually was a basement fire uh so that we we almost frankly we almost lost a company at that fire that was about two years ago i think that was a three alarm job uh we had basically we had companies crawling in the fire was underneath them and this is kind of a classic for those of you who are familiar with the mary paying fire the report on that from seattle now i mean a couple decades ago they could feel the floor was hot it was a concrete floor and thankfully they backed out just in time right before the floor collapsed they had to go defensive uh that business still hasn't been rebuilt but they are they're working on it and hopefully it'll reopen soon we've been doing a lot of reinvestment as you can see there uh restoring cuts from prior years thankfully with help from fema some safer grants afg grants doing a lot of training a lot of training with with ul uh and the firefighter safety research institute uh we've been you know really honored to work with isfsi and ul and niosh and a lot of others on a variety of different efforts and where this gets personal really is here matt letourneau one of our uh lieutenants and uh you know part of the ul fsri team uh steve grew up in delaware county which is where that research facility is located and uh i first met uh i've well i first met matt um steve and matt grew up together in delaware county steve kerber who you know i first met matt actually at the training facility where a lot of this work was done the research facility uh when he was actually helping the ul team do some of their research burns uh fast forward to january of 2018 uh absolutely you know terrible morning i was on my way to a funeral actually for one of our retired firefighters and diverted to uh what became a two-alarm fire in north philly and a circa 1850s row home that had been modified over the years this was not a basement fire it was a fatal fire as they pushed in there was a resident there who was who had already perished and uh during the course of that fire fight matt was killed in a collapse of the floor above the niosh report from that was released recently and matt was involved at the origins of the basement fire project until we we lost him much too soon and under tragic circumstances one of the reasons matt was involved it was personal for him too joyce craig one of our firefighters was killed in a fire that started off as a basement fire also in north philly further further north and that for us really makes this project personal matt's contribution and joyce's loss and again you can read those reports we've had uh you know many too many firefighters lost in the line of duty over the years and so for us this really was a a personal effort and we're really honored that isfsi and ul uh have put matt's name on this project uh and it's one of the reasons why we are so committed to helping to continue this work and we hope that you'll you know drive people to this and the all the great content that's out there and with that i'll turn it back over to uh seth and dan yeah thanks um you know the the project started i think three and a half years ago is that correct dan i think it started about three and a half years ago and you know it seems like it was a it was a freight train of a pace at the time and here we are you know getting to the end of the end of the fruition of our efforts and um you know we've ul's recently launched a online version of the basement fire we've been doing a delivery here for i think the last two years and we're about to launch our hot training coming up in the spring which is a grant funded as well and so i'd like to turn over to dan and speak a little bit about what we have available on the ul site for the online platform i know almost all of my membership at this department has gone through it and they really like it a lot and i think it's very intuitive and very very thoughtful thoughtful the way it is uh mapped out so dan what what do you have to say about that well i guess you know getting back to some of the drivers for this project uh the joyce craig fire in philly had so many similarities to the cherry road fire from 1999 in terms of the construction of the row home the interior finish and in some ways how the incident played out uh with regard to how the basement was ventilated and whatnot and uh the flow path and so as we've been learning more since 1999 uh certainly it was uh a tragedy that the same kind of uh fire uh had and uh the same kind of actions on the fire ground in effect um had such a tragic result so it's you know what what can we do to improve the knowledge base to give a better understanding that all basements aren't the same uh how basements get their air changes uh what the fire in the basement can do whether it's just going to be a smoking mess um with limited visibility and low heat or whether it could rapidly transition into a flashover as was the case in uh in philadelphia and in cherry road and of course many others in between those two and so that was some of the impetus for the isfsi to go after the dhs grant and uh and work with us uh to develop the research and so on our website and also accessible through the isfsi webpage is the research report and that's been posted there for a few years now um but the idea is how do we turn that into training actionable training and how do we get that out there and isfsi uh has been going around the country uh doing face-to-face trainings and you know one of the challenges is uh there just aren't enough um knowledgeable instructors to go around and so we tried to do a stop uh block measure if you will and we did a summary video about a year or so ago that sort of had you know here's the here's the top the top couple of points we want you to take away from this and we've had that summary video it's about 15 minutes long posted on our web page and it gets quite a few views but in october we were fortunate to be able to release an online version a shortened version of the eight hour training class and so it doesn't take you eight hours to go through online it's as i say it is a a shortened version but it does give the student an opportunity to uh get a basic understanding of the important fire dynamics that go on with the basement fires uh some understanding that the basements can you know draw a vacuum uh for example um and that there are three different categories of basement fires in terms of ventilation uh whether it's no access meaning it can't get air and you can't get people in or out of the basement other than an internal stair there's no exterior access or whether it has limited exterior access small basement windows that could be on the front or side of the building but still too small to get people in and out of but now you could get water in there if that was an opportunity to start cooling things down before you made the interior approach and then full access which means you've got large exit windows and or a doorway whether it's a a single door or a sliding glass door and the key point there is that should that door open unexpectedly while you've got a crew trying to make the stairs uh the results could be disastrous and uh so you've gotta you wanna take the approach if you can of getting water in that basement early to prevent that flashover event uh so then you can get crews successfully down the stairs or or in the basement so we've presented some data from the study as well as uh hopefully some very good graphics that people can see and uh as i say it's been online now a little more than a month and in that time um almost 6 000 people have successfully taken the course uh so that's really been a given given the timing there that's uh that's been uh quite a response that a lot of people have taken it and we've gotten good feedback in on the value that people have gotten from it so again we're thankful to have partners like isf aside to work with to help keep us guided in the path that uh we want to teach people what do you want them to do in the street right what is useful knowledge to them what can help them do their job uh more effectively and safer and that's really what we're after yeah so what the research really and really captured was you know what is happening when the door door events what's happening with the window vents what happens when the slide out basement window vents and what does that look like inside and so we can intelligently and smartly speak to what those tactics look like and not telling everybody the way they should fight fire but telling everybody what's the safest way to to address that's current situation so you know we have a lot of recommendations in the presentation both on the online delivery as well as the classroom delivery and what this is really catapulted forward is our next dhs grant before kovit hit was uh doing a train the trainer and then doing the deliverable around the country to i think 50 deliverables for um the hot train hands-on training for attacking and understanding and fighting basement fires so we're really excited for the next project to go underway and we're going to teach a lot about fire dynamics a lot about nozzle placement what kind of nozzles worked in the test um what kind of tactics worked in the test really well and and just really back it up by science i would like to say that you know we got a lot of people jumping on that if anybody has any questions along the way we have that chat room that i'm kind of monitoring and i'll just rudely interrupt commissioner teal or dan to ask that question or you guys can kind of virtually raise your hand and i'll try to call you it's really hard as the window fills up that i can't see everybody's name so the chat room is definitely the best place to to fire off a question so you know as far as uh did anybody have a chance by raising their hand you know to take that online class yet okay great awesome forest did you what was one of your big takeaways from that class i just liked uh what matter of fact what dan just said there when they talked about the definitions and kind of setting what we're calling all those things where we've got no access limited access and full access uh and then just the you know the nozzle piece i thought was uh it was pretty important too we're able to uh you know look at the effectiveness of of the different points of attack of the different nozzles and it looks like pizza on there too and i know pete had a couple of good points just on you know the application uh you know through those smaller limited access windows and the bungalows and the single families where you don't have a full uh you know full walkout or whatever there that uh that that because we've got a lot of that here in our area that was uh you know one of my big takeaways there yeah um you know another question that just came up in the chat room is where dan where can we find this class online if you go to the ul website uh firefightersafety.org or just google uh ul fire safety academy uh that'll put you into uh the place where all our courses are collected and the basement uh course is there if you haven't registered with the academy before it'll just ask you some basic information because basically what i'll do for you is uh keep a transcript uh so if you finish multiple classes and you need to print out a certificate to uh you know show your work or or just you want to keep it for yourself you're able to do that uh the fire safety academy basically our learning management system gives us an opportunity now that we didn't have a year ago and that is if a fire department wants to identify a super user um they can call our angie bennett uh get with our folks and get the super user put in place and then anybody from their fire department that takes the class and uh and passes it or or is in process of taking it or whatever the super user can see everybody from their department and uh track their progress if uh such as in the case of like philadelphia they wanted everybody in the department to take the class there's ways of tracking that and giving you some capability there that's awesome there's no no cost that's awesome uh yeah we kind of created a little safety academy within our organization to hit all those classes it's been pretty successful you know for my organization which is small and get buy-ins very instantaneous and um very easy i was i was interested on commissioner teal you know how did this go over you being the forefront within the basement fire study and being part of the tech panel how did this go over in your organization well you know we we definitely weren't sure uh you know we have a lot of very experienced firefighters a lot of fires uh we had a lot of lessons a lot of recommendations i mean we there were a lot of niosh recommendations that came out of the report on joyce craig's death and when i came to philadelphia that report had not yet been released so i've been here since may of 2016. that fire occurred in 2014 and not long after i got here that report was released and i think uh you know what we did in terms of rolling out that report kind of set the stage for some of this work we did town hall meetings and again you know at our size if we want to train anybody on anything we want to train our entire workforce for eight hours it's about 3.2 million dollars in overtime for that eight hour block so what we did was kind of had these town halls and ran them on opposite shifts so people could come and just kind of set the stage and said look uh we understand we have a lot of experience fighting these kinds of fires but obviously we had a really bad day and we've had other bad days so what can we do to you know certainly appreciate what we're doing but take advantage of the latest research and the latest science and we were really fortunate then to be able to enlist ul fsri is a partner uh and you know me being on the advisory board but i you know ul has done this for a lot of different organizations and since that time you know we've delivered we've gotten afg grants and delivered uh fire dynamics training to everybody in our department incident command training to everybody uh almost 3 000 people in each one of those and we what we really had was we had and i think this the things i'm about to say are true i mean i've worked in departments five different states all different sizes shapes configurations career volunteer combination what we had was certainly we had some naysayers we had some folks who really stepped up without a lot of prompting we kind of gave them the opportunity and said look here's this course here's this training go check it out we're not going to tell you what to think about it and they you know this was the the ul boot camps and they went up to um you know to visit with our colleagues with the fdny and some other things and they really they really embraced it so we had some champions and they were the ones who really kind of on a peer-to-peer basis started this wave of change in these conversions and you know now when you see this you know we have firefighters retired firefighters who say you know we wish we'd had we wish we had known some of these things through the years and and we know this is difficult and some of them have been very honest and said look this was a really hard change to make and i listened to you know that they would say uh we listen to these you know young guns they would probably say because anybody who's not retired as a young gun uh and what they were saying made sense and then as people kind of could see the science and apply that to what they had seen over their careers it really does kind of make sense and frankly we were doing a lot of things that you know ul was maybe using different you know terms that we were talking about a little bit differently and everybody has their own vernacular for this i mean i think when we started the basement project we spent the whole first day trying to define as you'll recall what's a basement but at the end of the day the fire doesn't care and i think folks really you know kind of oh well this makes sense to me i've seen this i didn't call it that we didn't think about this tactic you know for us it's normal uh to do some of these things and we just kind of but really having these champions and and not we didn't push people you know i didn't go and say do this or we're going to change everything i said look we're good at what we do we've had some really bad days there's a lot of new science a lot of new research go check it out see what you think and really they ended up kind of converting uh converting their colleagues the other thing i think that's important in this effort right now this webinar demonstrates it has been a lot of cross-pollination so as our folks are talking to folks in other cities regardless of size or configuration we all have fires and i think that's been a big part of this too is being able to leverage technology and it makes it easier to bring people together uh from around the nation and frankly from around the globe and you know firefighters are really smart people and i think if we give them the information and give them the tools they'll get there yeah thanks dan what was your biggest takeaway or a couple takeaways from that research that either surprised you or validated what you're thinking as far as tactics with basement fires i mean as you know when we set up the study we um we're setting up the approach especially from the small windows for a a fire attack from a small window so that it would be challenged uh we had the fire ignite the seat of the fire was on the opposite side of the basement 1200 square foot basement basically and there was a stairway in between the window and the seat of the fire as well as a mechanical room um and we still had tremendous impact on controlling that fire cooling the fire gases uh and enabling somebody to make a push down the stairs uh quickly um and finish the fire off so i think that some of those were uh impressive some of the the data impressive was how fast it was running out of oxygen and how it would pull oxygen out of the bedroom upstairs when the building was closed up and then once you applied water how rapidly the oxygen would be replenished in remote bedrooms upstairs so that if there was a victim trapped there uh getting rid of the fire in a hurry uh really was doing was providing the best service you can good for them potentially in terms of them rescuing them and getting them out so those were those were some big things another thing that's uh happened this fall is uh nfpa released a guide to structural firefighting called nfpa 1700 and um uh that was made up of uh fire chiefs and firefighters uh different rank uh from across the country uh a couple from canada as well and um sort of again i'm getting on this page of definitions and what do things mean and one of the bigger changes in there i think is the idea of what is a offensive strategy and what is a defensive strategy traditionally the fire service has defined those strategies based on where you're standing so if you're outside it must be defensive and if you're inside it must be offensive and that's been redefined now in 1700 with the idea what is your plan if you plan to go interior then that is an offensive strategy that offensive strategy might include a shot from the outside with some water to begin fire control from the exterior while you're making entry or to enable others to make entry um where previously that thought was well we're defensive and then we're transitioning the offenses no your intent is to go inside to put the fire out and rescue anybody inside how you do that then is independent it's just a matter of what tactics are you using to accomplish your goal quickly and effectively and efficiently and so i think that that change in thinking will help some people um embrace fire under understanding fire behavior also embrace people understanding that you've got options it's not one size fits all when there's a reason why you size up a fire so you can understand what you've got it what you have what your resources are and then make some choices especially the first engine company on scene right the cap like what are we gonna do and um in many cases you know that 95 percentile that you use we're going in the front door we're hitting it and it's going to be it's going to be good and in you know five minutes it's over and most the time that works but then you have these anomalies you know like the paying fire or cherry road or whatnot you got a basement fire and there are many others um and you say you know maybe running in the or wilmington delaware for example going in the front two lines in the front door was not the right answer there right and it cost people their lives um so understanding that there's options for those that five percent of the cases that could be extremely high risk uh how do you take care of that and how do you best serve your customer and yourselves thanks dan uh chief schaefer you know have you guys navigated this basement fire curriculum the online um i know that we did a deliverable out there in boston and i don't know how what the culture is like i know you guys got a tremendous amount of basements in boston i grew up in vermont myself so that's a that's a real deal and a lot of no access basements um in boston as well where it's very difficult and very challenging to find a transitional attack so did your organization go through this or how's this embraced or how's this look in boston so we we did the uh the live course uh dan came up and uh from new york was uh john cerrillo delivered that that was a couple of summers ago and that was well received and then based on beacon street we finally got um a fire dynamics program going we've got a whole full-scale prop that uses flow path and as part of that curriculum we go over basement strategies as well um so we don't uh we haven't assigned the the online although i think we're going to be trying to make it available on target you know through target uh for anybody who is interested but we have not made that mandatory in is this stuff kind of in line with the way you guys have been doing business in boston or has it changed anything yeah we're trying to change it's uh some initial resistance as i think commissioner thiel pointed out you know the older guys thinking that that was uh not the right way to go that that was defensive and uh cowardly to put it mildly but um it's changing we're really the fire dynamic stream that we have been rolling out has gone pretty well and it's been well received and i think uh we're trying to steer the ship in that direction so it's it's getting there thanks for that um it's funny when we're going through this course and we're kind of doing that three year project with it with the tech panel and doing all the test burns um one of the guys on our tech panel was chief cochran out of san francisco who's probably one of the most fantastic guys i've ever met in my life but they had a really bad fire down in chinatown in san francisco that they just couldn't get out to it i think it was two floors below grade and he said well let's try this transitional attack piercing cellar nozzle thing and end up putting the fire out and this is why this guy's going through our economy so that's a big cultural shift for san francisco i think when you when you if you try something new and you get some initial success with it it becomes much easier than to build on that so you know as of yet i don't have a concrete example of traditional attack or some of the things you can find but i keep hoping that it's going to come into play and then when guys see it in action and working we'll have more success adopting you know part wide and sort of bring it strong hello jack wilson here hello sorry jack did you have something yeah i do i just want to comment on dan's comments about wilmington delaware since i retired from there in 2015 um retired just before the incident happened a pretty sad moment for us but the uh i know that we'll make the fire department uh culturally like everybody else in this area uh where our buildings are no different in philadelphia or camden or trenton or i mean we are the same tax construction same type cities uh other than were made smaller and manpower issues the culturally uh sound portions of the wilmington fire department was the reason why that fire did go well for them uh that's i mean we go to them structures five six times a day there's pictures on our website right now from similar structures they had working fires in the last couple days there um i know their so rp's have been changing it's still a culturally changing process i guess it's just like chief schaefer said uh uh i know it's kind of sad and i think that that they also the wilmington fire department is also trying to move forward to a a better culture with this uh the amount of basement fires and stuff that they do it counter on that uh it's like i said i lost three good friends but the uh the issue is as we move forward to the future and especially the entire state of delaware who uh culturally runs the same way but uh it's hard to to make that that process move forward sometimes and i like i said i i i appreciate the the hard work of all the other people with this uh basement fire thing especially uh you know i got to see some of that a couple years ago uh when you guys about us to come up from the fire school here but the uh like i said it's a it's a tough thing and i just say that the amount of basement fires that they get in that city and it's no different than anybody else not trying to say it's different but it's just it's hard to beat the culture down so thanks jack i appreciate that so dan what a what about um you know the type of nozzles that we were using and what did you find out the best the best nozzle to use or or what did the guys like best what was the most productive i think part of it was um what's the nozzle you have uh so if uh if you can find a way to make the nozzle you have that you've got water connected to it right now work for you uh absolutely and i mean that was one of the reasons why we did a number of the uh experiments that we did with uh just like putting a fog nozzle uh either in a window or or down in a hole because that may be what they have or a straight stream and of course we found that you know if you put a straight stream just straight down without being able to bank it off anything or break up the stream in any way it may not be very effective in terms of uh cooling the gases so that i mean that's from the floor going straight down um from the window the straight stream going off the rafters or off walls uh that was very effective at reducing temperatures in the basement and allowing the push down that would allow push down the stairs um same thing with the with the fog nozzle now are things like a breslin distributor or some of the piercing nozzles that are designed for a high flow rate 150 gallons per minute or higher and are designed to you know really spread the water out and and throw it up high to the burning rafters or the burning floor assembly um absolutely it's fantastic whether you're doing an attic fire or or a basement fire they work very well but uh the key thing in many cases is timing and uh how can you get water on the fire the fastest and uh so that was you know some of the reasons for using some of the baseline nozzles as well as the specialty nozzles uh to to look at different variations there may be a case where you've got to use a specialty nozzle because it's in some kind of closed off area you can't get to or confined space or what have you and you may have the some luxury of time uh if you will or or you may only have two people on the fire ground and have no other choice uh i mean there's a lot of reasons for for picking those things and again it gets back to understanding the options that are available to you looking at the resources that you have that are going to respond to a fire typically and then doing a little bit of pre-planning to say what's my plan b um in most of the line of duty deaths uh that you look at um it's a in the pen this is in the past things are changing but fire departments have a plan a and again that works most of the time for them and it works very successfully uh it's the case when when niosh gets called when you needed a plan b and you didn't have one and then in the process of that all accountability is lost um you don't know where people are people get separated but everything on the fire ground just kind of breaks down to you can recover and the question is can you recover fast enough before there's the incident and uh i kind of liken it to watching my 10 year old grandson play basketball uh the coaches go out there and for the first play of the game the coaches position each kid on each side like you know you're covering that kid you're covering that kid and they have sort of the one play initially they inbound the ball you see a pick and roll and whatnot and the shot goes up and then after the first shot and it doesn't go in there's a rebound and whatnot then it's just chaos right there's everybody every which way and um i think this analogy there in a way to some fire departments that they don't have that plan b what happens if the first shot doesn't hit i like it chieftail you talked about you know putting you know how expensive it would be to put everybody through your training program if you have a new concept um has this influenced anything as far as the boots and the recruit academy and have you instituted this these new tactics or fire behavior within that academy when you're getting the boots to show up on for training the first day uh yeah a couple things there one i think it's important and i know preaching to the choir here every instructor knows this one class does not a culture change make or does not a fire department make so it really does have to be kind of continuous learning uh one of the things we did when when i first got here i saw this like box in the corner of a room i said well what's that well we used to have our own cable channel i said well what would it take for us to to stand that up again so we have we put together we basically bought what we needed to buy which wasn't super expensive and we have pfdtv that's streaming out to all 70 of our work locations 63 firehouses seven other locations and it's continuous we're always putting i mean the first thing we did was put everything that ul had available up on that pfd tv and it's in a continuous loop so we're trying to immerse people in this and again it wasn't we're making you watch this we're making you watch this we just take stuff and including from a lot of your departments boston thank you the cancer video has been huge for us we just grab all this stuff and put it on that tv pfd tv channel and it hits i mean you know firehouse is the tv's on 24 7. they may not be watching it but the tv's on you know even if it's just noise and i'm really gratified when i go to firehouses and see that pfd tv on so that's part of it computers are a challenge for us i think like a lot of big urban departments you know we have in our firehouses whatever it is you know eight to 15 people sharing one or two desktop computers uh but we have been working on trying to get some learning management systems out there kind of having fly away kits uh to deliver the firehouses to do content but our you know our members are really dedicated and yours are too i've actually seen our members trying to hack into our city's own i.t networks to try to access the learning management system because it didn't have enough ports so we're trying to leverage technology some of this though is old school i mean we created a field training unit out of our academy those are the folks who've been down for the past few weeks with dan over in delaware county basically just soaking all this stuff up and they've been going out so we're trying to also embrace kind of a hybrid delivery model we used to have this very academy-centric model where if you were going to get training of any kind jump on the rig head up to the academy which is in a very difficult to access part of the city takes you out of your first do you got to drive all the way back so for a four hour training block you're spending an entire shift getting there coming back from so we're trying to do the remote stuff remotely and then bring in the field training unit you know we're putting them in vehicles keeping them mobile to kind of go out and do the hands-on stuff and then occasionally to put it all together you'll go to our academy or you'll go to one of the other academies i know today our folks have been doing flashover stuff uh down with ul and and i saw kirby kiefer from uh the delaware county emergency services training center so we also is kind of uh you know sixth largest city in the u.s we've been maybe a little insular over the years and i think that's really and again it's a credit to our members it's not me we've really kind of opened that up and and again our our neighbors delaware county montgomery county pa chester county pa have been very gracious bucks county and allowing us to come and use their facilities to learn from them uh to leverage the expertise that's that's around us so it really has been this confluence the point is it ain't one class we have to surround people with all this stuff all the time you know we've been doing work with drexel around safety culture and the the firefighter research institute they have there and it's working a lot of it is working i think just because of this immersion and again we have some really great folks who are embracing this embracing the science and doing that peer-to-peer peer-to-peer model but it does take resources i mean we have spent money on uh field training folks and in the academy you know our academy is nine months long so it's hard to add things to it but we have we are doing things differently there including trying to flip the classroom there as well you know death by powerpoint didn't work for any of us we hated it uh and you know it never worked it's valuable to a point so we're also trying to re-rack our academy and you know we're talking about we put 90-100 cadets in there at once i think last year we had two academies going at the same time so we had 200 some odd people wandering around we have to do that just to get them through but a lot of these resources we've been using as well and taking that into the classroom and trying to flip the classroom so where and you know the the folks that we're hiring have no issue with being able to go online they'll go home and go online and watch something so why are we going to show it to them again on powerpoint in the classroom when we could be using that time for scenarios or hands-on so we're really it's it's everything all the time to try to drive this change and it's really been working it's a credit to our members that it's working yeah i think it's new times and we've we've demonstrated as well with with being in covet for the last you know almost year here and showing that different delivery models are highly effective with our membership and you know the guys that are coming through the front door as brand new firefighters are already used to this whole learning management software platforms and stuff like that hey dan so um from a fire dynamics standpoint um you know i i'm just scratching the surface and i've been following you around for about 12 years now and you being very you know very intelligent about it all what surprised you or what backed up what you're already thinking in these basement fire studies from a fire dynamic standpoint uh what surprised me on the uh the basement fire with no exterior access uh was that it basically pulled a vacuum so as the fire built up it creates pressure and then as the gases cool they contract and that vacuum then it went under so it was negative pressure relative to atmospheric pressure which then causes uh the fresh air from the first floor to be pulled down so the interesting thing there is when we cut a hole at the front door threshold to introduce a breslin distributor the firefighter didn't get a face full of smoke because it was sucking down that hole trying to get air for combustion and that was a pretty interesting uh set of tests for for those those scenarios the amount of vacuum that pulled the negative pressure that it pulled yeah that i mean i didn't i didn't even pretend to understand that until you explained it to me so that was a shocker to me as well well we're kind of in the home stretch here i just want to kind of highlight you know the webinar that we have coming up in january 4th is that correct dan i think it's 18 14 14 thanks lee so january 14th doing a webinar on the basement fires and uh on closing thoughts let's start with commissioner teal just anything to kind of wrap it up you're kind of in the home stretch and anything you want to add again i think this what we're talking about demonstrates the value of having all of these organizations ul isfsi all these different departments of all shape sizes around the country collaborating i mean i i really think that has been a big part of moving this and making it work and you know i'm at uh i guess i start my 30th year in this business next well in january which is hard to believe and it and it has changed things have changed a lot you know they haven't maybe changed as much as we would like uh but things are definitely moving folks have embraced this and i really think that these collaborative efforts have been a huge part of that and i would also encourage everybody to uh make sure you put intershoots usa 2021 on your calendar come join us in philly in october of 2021 uh and you'll be able to see some of this stuff firsthand and uh probably still wearing a mask but uh we'll definitely be good by then so come join us thank you very much dan you want to wrap this up for us i just want to uh say that i i thought that the training that we were able to do for the philadelphia fire department was incredible uh chief van dork was there uh helping us with that and uh chief schaefer and some of his crew from boston uh captain mike mccarthy showed what a wizard he is in uh in presenting uh some flow path information with a alcohol fuel prop and uh that was essential for philadelphia because as they were taking the training on the road they couldn't burn uh class a materials and create smoke all the time where they were so they uh they found that prop to be very useful and i think uh enabling that training group uh to do what they did it's just amazing that uh we met with them and we gave the class last february and still these uh some of the folks were down here today i mean they've been they've been here for every test some number of them but they came down today and it's uh you know wind chill feels like you know sort of 25 degrees kind of thing and uh we've got a fire test going and they're standing out there an hour before an hour afterwards wanting to soak it all in and see what's going on if anybody online is interested in the kind of tests that we've been running the past few months they go to our website we have a link there for our virtual visitors day that we had uh saturday a week ago or so and uh you can pull it up on youtube and watch what everybody got to see live that day which includes a walk through the prophet and seeing the fire experiment getting an understanding what we're trying to do with regard to our current research on size up search and rescue so i would encourage everybody to share that with their uh with their friends awesome thanks dan does anybody have any questions for these two guys why we still got them on the horn before we cut them loose here okay well here none commissioner teal dan i know you guys are super super busy today and i really really really appreciate you guys taking time to hang out with is fsi it's a big deal for me and the rest of the organization to have some face time with you guys so thank you thank you very much so with that so with that i'm going to stay on the line and if anybody has any questions i put my email on the top if i can't answer the question i'm going to fire it off to one of the people that i know the answer to and everybody stay healthy out there we are doing our uh virtual conference coming up stay tuned we just finalized that the last couple days so stay tuned for that and we'll see everybody next time thanks everybody stay safe healthy be well everyone hey yes sir you see uh uh pete if you're still on did you see joe pernesti's uh question on there on the uh commercial like type three uh type three basements that uh that might be a good follow-up there yeah yeah like 338 or something like that lee or something well yeah 437 any specific differences between a residential versus a commercial basement type three maintenance plans i mean certainly there's differences uh with the construction method and how you might have to you know want to try to get through the floor but there's also i guess the commonalities to say to uh to look at are again with regard to the ventilation um so fuel loads may be different uh construction methodology may be different but the question is where can it get air and how much air can it get can it flash over on you or not um so if it's a a seller which means it's sort of a sub basement whether it's residential or commercial and there's no uh exterior ability for it to get air uh you know it's going to be a smoky mess but you've got some time uh to work on it a little bit because the likelihood of it getting enough air to to really take off is not gonna be there now the caveat to that would be uh somebody's got pool chemicals or some other oxygen generating a chemical down there that you know will change the game on in terms of the commercial space so again it's uh you know are you responding to a hardware store are you responding to a commercial office building uh kind of thing pete you got any ideas on that uh i don't have any ideas i just want to re-emphasize what you said and and this kind of tails into what uh commissioner thiel was emphasizing is that you've got to immerse guys in this information and you got to be patient because it's going to take a while um that we're still getting questions like that is kind of interesting right as you said it's about the air the the mechanics of the fire ground will vary based on its commercial it's residential stuff like that but the fire dynamics really aren't going to change the fire that you know the fire dynamics is we know it's got enough fuel where's the air how much air is it going to get how do i minimize the air while i maximize my water and those those basic fundamentals apply no matter where you're at right uh so the i i try to say to guys you know the the the fire fire ground every fire ground is different but every fire is not different and i i think we we're still a ways away from that that fundamental understanding is that the fire is going to behave the same way if it gets air and and the fire ground might dictate how it's going to get air or where it's going to get air but the the fundamental part of how that fire is going to grow and develop doesn't change regardless no matter what kind of structure thanks pete mike uh what i typed in the chat if you take a look at the father's day fire that would be a good example of a basement fire in a hardware store um and as dan alluded to changing up the fuel or fire loads um so that's one to look at if somebody wants to go back and and take a look and uh look at what can happen because that was definitely as dan said one of those five percent that doesn't fit the model um and those are the ones you have to be looking out for which like ties back into the size up and picking up on those things so awesome yeah all right well dan thank you so much i know you're slamming busy out there bob you have a question sorry buddy i have an off subject question when we when we get a chance okay uh dan i know you're super busy thanks bud we will uh see you next okay time guys and lee thank you