response strategy
Improving The new SAVE approach from Hampshire FRS in the UK is designed to combat many of the current challenges facing fire and rescue services. Deputy Chief Fire Officer Andy Bowers explains how a review of operational tactics led to the service transforming its response strategy.
L
ike all fire and rescue services, Hampshire FRS has been facing many challenging issues over the last decade. Amongst these are falling experience levels, reduced exposure to incident command, increasing difficulty with recruitment and retention of on-call staff, availability of retained fire appliances, and firefighter contamination at fires. Each of these has its own difficulties, and traditionally each has been dealt with separately. At Hampshire, we decided to take stock of our firefighting tactics after the Shirley Towers tragedy in 2010 and embarked on a process of improvements in our operational effectiveness. We were already employing positive pressure ventilation as
part of a tactical ventilation strategy and using thermal imaging cameras extensively – although at the time there was only one camera on each appliance – but we knew that we needed to improve our firefighting options. This review of tactics led to the development of the SAVE approach – Scan, Attack, Ventilate, Enter/Extinguish. According to traditional firefighting tactics, our default strategy for most fires involved the early deployment of a two-person breathing apparatus crew into a building to search for casualties and/or the compartment of origin with either a hose reel or main jet. This is often described as the ‘Two BA, now what have we got?’ syndrome. This approach had been in use for many years, virtually unchanged, and we realised that we needed to add other options to our commander’s decision making. At around the same time as this review, ultrahigh-pressure lances (UHPL) began to emerge in the UK as a firefighting option, although uptake at this point was minimal.
Knowledge base We concluded that we needed to develop a much more integrated approach based on a number of key areas. We identified five pivotal knowledge areas for firefighters: emergency call handling and mobilising; fire behaviour; fire science; building construction (both traditional and modern); and tactical firefighting options. At HFRS we understand that a solid underlying knowledge base is key to firefighter competence at every level. Therefore, we rewrote all our training materials and redesigned all of the
The SAVE approach from Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service involves the use of thermal imaging cameras at every stage of an incident; the service has also adopted ultra-highpressure piercing lances as a standard part of its response protocol.
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