Fire-fighters’ personal protective clothing is the only source of protection for fire-fighters during fire-fighting. The protective clothing should provide adequate protection as well as should be comfortable to wear. The protection and comfort requirements are always the contradicting fact in several protective clothing including fire-fighters’. Appropriate material selection, clothing design ...

The Emergency Medical Response (EMR) program is a Victorian Government initiative in which fire fighters trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation and equipped with automatic external defibrillators are dispatched to suspected cardiac arrests simultaneously with ambulance paramedics across metropolitan Melbourne. During the first 12 months (February 2000 to February 2001) of the expanded EMR pro...

The Promoting Healthy Lifestyles: Alternative Models' Effects (PHLAME) study evaluates the efficacy of two intervention strategies for improving nutrition and physical activity practices in fire fighters: a team-centered program and a one-on-one format targeting the individual. PHLAME compares these two behavior change models (the team-based versus the one-on-one approaches) against a usual-car...

Current test methods used for quantifying the thermal performance of fire fighters’ protective clothing are not providing information needed to understand why fire fighters are being burned. Many of the thermal exposures where fire fighters receive serious bum injuries are much lower than those specified in current test methods. In addition, current test methods do not provide a means to measur...

Emergencies in industrial warehouses are a major concern for fire fighters. The large dimensions together with the development of dense smoke that drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges. The Guardians robot swarm is designed to assist fire fighters in searching a large warehouse. In this paper we discuss the technology developed for a swarm of robots assisting fire fighters....

Excerpt] Also important to any analysis of labor costs in the public sector today is, of course, the effect of collective bargaining on wages. For reasons described in a recent article by Orley Ashenfelter, fire fighters provide an excellent test of union wage effects at the city level. This study will therefore use fire fighters as an example with which to assess and compare the effects on wag...

In January 1990, three professional fire fighters combating a residential fire became unconscious and were brought out of the structure in full cardiac arrest—one was successfully resuscitated; two died. The IAFF contacted NIOSH in April, and a team (consisting of a physician, a respirator specialist, and an occupational safety and health specialist) conducted an investigation of the incident. ...

Widespread public sector unionism emerged only in the 1960s, as individual states opened the door to collective bargaining for state and municipal workers. This study exploits differences in timing across states to construct estimates of the causal effects of public sector collective bargaining rights on pay, benefits, and employment for teachers, fire fighters, and police. Perhaps surprisingly...

The increasing capabilities of robot systems enable new fields of practical applications for individual robots as well as multi-robot systems. But for some application scenarios like a fire or earthquake disaster current robots are still too limited to act fully autonomously in the disaster area. To overcome these limitations we consider a heterogeneous team of humans and robots complementing e...