By Corey Everitt
Nar Nar Goon Fire Brigade members are taking it upon themselves to conduct what is believed to be a nation-first trial of an air filtration system in their station to combat concerns over hazardous air exposure.
The brigade last week installed the American-manufactured filtration unit in their equipment changeroom, which has had an immediate positive response from members in the unit.
The brigade has had a disproportionately large number of members diagnosed with cancer in recent years.
Nar Nar Goon Brigade Captain Justin Seddon says the members are working on ways to address the potentially contributing hazards at the station.
“What we’ve got here is, over the last 15 years, a large number of members that have developed a form of cancer,” Captain Seddon said.
“We are trying to do what we can to limit their exposure before we may discover that diesel particulates are the new asbestos.”
The filtration unit called ‘Station Protect’ is from US-based fire-fighting equipment manufactured by Task Force Tips (TFT), distributed by Australian company GAAM.
The unit is capable of filtrating an area of 220 square metres. In the already confined changeroom of Nar Nar Goon station, it can filter the air four times every minute,
It specialises in filtering the hazardous particulars that firefighters regularly encounter and/or bring back to a station such as diesel exhaust, viruses and harmful particulars from varying kinds of smoke broadly called volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
The trial is all at the expense of the brigade and its members, who are currently loaning the unit from GAAM.
“No one is getting paid, all doing it through their free time, the least that should be going on is not getting exposed to things we don’t need to be exposed to,” Captain Seddon said.
“All this stuff is purely getting driven by the members here to protect their health.”
The trial was started within Volunteer Fire Brigades Victoria (VFBV).
Keven Chisholm, a member of the brigade himself, is one of a few members who initiated a sub-group project within VFBV to address health concerns in fire stations, where this initiative grew out of.
“We run a group within our own organisation, the VFBV, a Healthy Fire Station Project as a sub group,” Mr Chisholm said.
“So we went round looking at issues on these stations, getting rid of the diesel fuel, all that sort of stuff, separating the dirty zone from the clean zone.
“We knew about this filtration stuff out in America and the company that looks after it, GAAM actually said to me they’ve got this stuff coming and I said can we look at something for stations, so that’s how we got on to the air cards.”
These “air cards”, also from TFT, are air quality tests purposed for stations. It was about two months ago the sub group acquired some of these products.
“They have little coloured beads in them, the one on the right is the sample, that’s the colour, the other is the one that actually changes,” Mr Chisholm said.
“It absorbs all these things that are in that area, and it changes the colour to signal to you that you’ve got an issue in your station.”
The air cards had been placed all over the station; the test is meant to go over a month, yet the cards reacted to the station’s air quickly.
“We know the one in the change-out room changed in about seven days, that went pretty quick, the one in the engine bay went very quick, we had one in here, in our small recreation hall area, I think it took about 20 days,” Captain Seddon said.
“The faster they change the worse things are.”
These cards were also sent to other stations.
“I’ve got most of the survey back, they’ve all got concerns to varying degrees,” Mr Chisholm said.
“But this is probably the hottest one here.”
The air cards are reacting to a host of particles that linger in stations; most people think of diesel exhaust from the fire engines, but less commonly known is the hazards brought back from sites, referred to as ‘off-gasses’.
“Diesel particulates, smoke particulates, hazardous chemicals that we may attend, something as simple as a car fire, smoke from car fires leeches into our gear which then leeches into our skin, so what we’re doing is trying to eliminate that stuff off-gassing from when we come back,” Captain Seddon said.
“Even though our gear is sent away for cleaning, it’s extra stuff, so our helmets, we can wipe our helmets down but it doesn’t get rid of everything, our boots and then you got our clothing underneath.”
It was through results of the air cards that Kevin and the sub-group stayed in contact with GAAM and consequently TFT where they would secure a loan on the Station Protect filtration unit.
For the immediate future, the brigade will run the air cards with the unit in place, determined to see better air quality results over the next week particularly in the equipment changeroom where it is installed.
The brigade does not have the money to afford the unit as it costs roughly $8000AUD and $700 to replace the filter.
However, Captain Seddon and Mr Chisholm hope the temporary trial will start an overall process of addressing dangerous exposure from other brigades and even higher institutions, an issue Australian firefighting is still catching up to.
“I can give you an example, I started back in 1991, I was 11-years-old, back then I remember when I was 15 or 16 going to my first house fire,” Captain Seddon said.
“The attitude was, don’t worry about putting a breathing apparatus on, you stand in the smoke, you get a gut full of it, it makes you better for the next time.
“You had to get used to the smoke, that was back then, I don’t blame anyone for back then, that was just the attitude, the dirty your gear was it looked like you worked the hardest.
“Where now, we’ve completely changed the paradigm, it’s about clean gear, we come back from a fire, the first thing the guys do now is their gear goes into the washing machine or sent away for professional cleaning.
“Years ago, they’d go to a fire, you’d come in the next day you could smell the off-gas in the station, we are hopefully at a point now that we don’t do that.”
Illnesses and coughing fits from attending emergencies are meant to be things of the past, but the technology and practices in Australian stations haven’t necessarily caught up.
“We’ve got to change the culture in CFA and voluntary firefighting, it probably applies to your SES and those volunteer systems,” Mr Chisholm said.
“The very start of it is colour-coded buckets, most of them didn’t even know about it, there are different buckets for different areas which is the same protocol as in hospitals, stopping cross contamination.”
While many countries have implemented or have started to implement systems such as overall air filtration like the Station Protect or the direct point-of-capture systems that extract diesel exhausts in the station, most of Australia’s stations lack such measures.
Point-of-capture equipment exists in some big metropolitan brigades of the FRV, but is far from universal.
Air filtration in the fire engines is not common either, with Nar Nar Goon’s soon-to-come new rescue to trial one.
While Captain Seddon and Mr Chisholm have heard of no other stations in Australia which currently have an installed air filtration system dedicated to the dangerous particles of fire fighting, hence why it is national-first.
“It seems to be an Australian thing, I don’t know what it is, in America it’s huge, New Zealand Fire Service, 600 stations, volunteer staff, they have point-of-capture in every fire station,” Mr Chisholm said.
While the brigade has the filtration unit, in its yet-to-be-determined time there it will hopefully prove a successful trial and catch the attention of brigades across the country.
“I would love to have money to buy this stuff, while we’ve got it on trial it’s great, I don’t want to see it go, we just haven’t got the money to afford to pay for it,” Captain Seddon said.
“I think we will see dramatic health improvements, within 20 minutes of yesterday we made up our mind that we probably need a second one.
“We haven’t told many that we have the filtration system in yet, so it will be an education process to get some of those brigades down, we’ll invite others to come down and have a look at it, we’ll get Kevin to do a bit of talk on it.”
