20070318FireFighting

A recent news article discusses the help provided by our firefighters to Australia during a recent bush fire.

At the bottom of the article, Cravens is quoted as having had to use a chart to do conversions between metric and imperial while fighting fires. While it's great that we send our men and women out to help other countries, we really need to make sure they have a solid knowledge of metric before they leave. In Australia, it's a reportable offense to use imperial measures while fighting a fire as confusion on a fire front is lethal.

Having a firefighter pull out a chart and do arithmetic in their heads every time they're given directions is unsafe both for them and the rest of the crew they're with. This issue goes both ways, if a firefighter from any other country in the world was over here helping, they'd have issues with conversions as well.

If we look at the wider issues of emergency response, think about the other places people could die because someone had to do a conversion:

• Weight is in kilograms rather than pounds. This is extremely important if you're trying to work out how much of a drug you need to provide to someone.
• Height is in meters instead of feet and inches. Is that 5 meter wall going to be hard to climb or just a small barrier you can lift yourself over?
• Blood pressure is in pascals rather than millimeters of mercury. Again, does this measurement mean the person is in danger?
• Body temperature is in Celsius not Fahrenheit. If a patients body temperature is reported as 40 degrees Celsius and a medic only understands Fahrenheit, they're not going to know that the patient is in serious danger.
• Distances are in meters or kilometers not feet, yards or miles. Not understanding what it means for a danger to be 5 meters away is highly likely to get you killed.
• Rates of travel will be in meters per second or kilometers per hour instead of feet or yards per second or miles per hour. If you're standing in front of a fire and someone says "the front is moving at 200km/h" and you don't understand that immediately, you'll get overrun in the time it takes to do the conversion.
• Air pressure is in pascals not millimeters of mercury. Understanding pressure fronts is important when fighting fires or any other emergency situation that deals with weather.
• And the list can go on...

Firefighters and other emergency response members are often already at significant risk, let's make their job just that little bit safer by standardizing on metric.