A thermal imaging camera is the tool that finds people in smoke, and every crew drills with it in the training house, where the rooms are known and the casualties are dummies at known positions. In the back bedroom of the smoke house the camera shows a warm figure on the floor, curled, in the corner, on every drill, and there is no dummy there, and the room has been searched with the smoke cleared.
I am the training officer, and the smoke house is my building.
How a drill runs.
The smoke house is a two storey shell with rooms and stairs, filled with cosmetic smoke from a machine, and dummies placed as casualties at positions I choose and record. Crews go in with breathing sets and the thermal camera and search, and the camera records what it sees for the debrief.
Every dummy is found or missed, and the record says which, and the camera's recording is the evidence.
In the back bedroom upstairs, on every drill, the camera shows a warm figure on the floor in the far corner.
Curled. Person sized. At about body temperature on the camera's scale, against a floor at the temperature of the building.
I have never placed a dummy in that corner. On the drills where I have placed one elsewhere in the room, the camera shows the dummy, at the dummy's temperature, which is the room's, and the warm figure in the corner, at thirty seven.
The crews go to it. That is what they are trained to do and it is what they do, every drill, and they reach the corner and there is nothing on the floor, and they search the corner with their hands as they are trained to, and it is floor.
What has been checked.
The camera. Four cameras, two makes. All four show the figure.
The room, with the smoke cleared and the lights on. An empty room with a window and a corner.
The floor in the corner, with a contact thermometer. Room temperature. With the camera in my own hands, standing in the cleared room in daylight, the corner shows a warm figure on the floor, curled, at thirty seven degrees, on a floor my thermometer says is fourteen.
The recording. It is on every drill's file. I have twenty two years of drills in that house on tape and then on disk, and I went back through them in the winter, and the figure is on every one that reached that room, back to the first camera we had, in 2002.
The position.
Curled, in the corner, facing the wall, which is how people are found when they have crawled as far as they could and stopped.
The smoke house was built in 1998 on the footprint of a real house that the brigade bought after a fatal fire, because the site was available and the shell was sound, and the back bedroom is the back bedroom, and the corner is the corner, and I have the incident file, which I should not have read, and I read it.
What is done about it.
The drills run. The crews find the figure, every time, which is a good thing for the crews, who are trained by it to go to a warm shape on the floor without hesitation, and I have decided that is a use.
I have not put a dummy in that corner since I read the file. It felt like something I should not do.
What I do.
I train the crews.
The one thing I have changed is that I do not do the safety walk of the back bedroom in the dark.
The safety walk is a check before each drill that the rooms are clear of hazards, done with a torch, with the smoke not yet in.
In the spring I did the walk with the thermal camera instead of the torch, because I had it in my hand, and in the back bedroom the figure was in the corner, as it is, and as I stood in the doorway it moved. It uncurled, slowly, stiffly, and stood, in the corner, facing the wall, at thirty seven degrees, taller than me, and stayed standing until I lowered the camera, and when I raised it again it was on the floor, curled, and I ran the drill.