At present I work for a contract as a fire fighter and used to be the company health and safety rep. The department has been given an unused building to use for training purposes. Unfortunately one of the managers has decided to use a metal bin with straw in to simulate a smoke environment inside this building. This is done at night when only four employees are on duty that means a breathing apparatus team of two, with another in BA as the instructor and one person outside. Everything about this seems wrong as even our SOP’s state that an emergency team is to be made available as soon as possible when using BA. I have spoken directly to the manager, no good, the new health and safety rep, still no effect. The managers seem quite happy to let this practice continue. The building itself is well constructed but has no power to it, so has no ventilation system in place should something go wrong. Any helpful advice welcome.

Hi Steve, Managed to get somewhere today by the simple expedient of stating a couple of possible outcomes. Any incident involving Breathing Apparatus is reportable under RIDDOR including training. Because smoke (not synthetic) is being used thereby making the atmosphere within the room toxic this now makes it a confined space and all those regulations now apply. I then explained what the legal penalties could be and it has been decided that all training exercises within the building using real smoke is to cease. The company health and safety engineer has been contacted and asked to review this procedure. The nail in the coffin was the support of my fellow fire fighters backing up my arguments which meant the manager had to concede the point. Reason why I'm no longer the rep is because the managers would not listen or act, which the new rep has told me that he had put my previous concern in writing to the senior manager and was totally ignored. Any wondered why I'm looking for a new job??? Still win a few and hopefully never lose a few!

As a complete outsider I feel that fire service personnel should be exposed to real smoke in a training scenario before they are expected to enter a smoke-filled room to rescue a smoke-victim for real. Any errors can be dealt with and corrected by experienced and competent personnel. The time to find out that the theory isn't understood is not when the firefighter is about to rescue my Grannie!

Agreed in full and have done so many times in training and as a BA instructor but certain safeties have to be put into place in a training environment. As a mistake in training should not result in a serious injury as it would in a real situation. So normally for actual training smoke filled rooms an emergency ventilation systems is in place and the temperature in the room is closely monitored, also emergency lighting kicks in with alarm bells to alert both staff and trainees. This facility does not have any of the above. The fire fighters also are required to do refresher training every four years at a proper training facility where they will do this as well as backdraught and flashover training (flashover is where you are really exposed to some serious heat and often get minor burns). This is about cutting corners and sudjecting employees to unnecessary risks, as this smoke can be simulated using synthetic smoke so no point in using the real as no real benefit IMHO.

Stuff - we stopped 'induction rights' and burn to learn a few years ago -after killing some trainees. I think Firestar is right and they have the right approach to attend specialist 'hot training' - occasionally, but should 'practice' with synthetic. Bleve - I am contemplating a response but not confident to challenge you on this...... yet .... (help someone it could be a 'heated debate'?). Smokey Steve

Hi Bleve, Not a works ERT team, as all trained fire fighters with all relevant competencies (including IPDS) not LA but MOD contract. Sorry for the confusion, should have made that clear. Thanks for all your responses, at present a couple of things are in motion so will see how it pans out and of course will let you know the results.