I am happy to be invited to participate in this workshop and of course to meet you and
see if we can find research subjects for future cooperation.
Sheet 1
Let me first introduce myself. My name is Ricardo Weewer and divide my time being a
professor in fire service science at the Dutch Fire service Academy and being a deputy
fire chief at Amsterdam – Amstelland Fire Service. Besides that I participate in the Fire
Service Scientific board and I am involved in a variety of projects at the national level.
The aim of today is trying to subjects in which we can cooperate regarding research and
development for the fire service.
Sheet 2
Before I come to that I think it is useful to understand more of the process we are in in
The Netherlands.
In 2008 we noticed that the world around us was changing rapidly, causing more and
more problems, which we were trying to tackle by an increasing number of projects
improving the fire service, at the professional level as well as the organizational level. It
merely became too much to deal with . That’s why the board of Fire Chiefs decided to do
a strategic journey, to make a new vision for the fire service, which would give direction
to prioritize activities.
We concluded that the present business model was out of date, and that we should jump
to a new business model. Such a jump means that we stop improving the existing, but
really look differently at subjects, innovate!
Sheet3
The result was that we set the direction towards a new business model called a
continuity concept. In this concept probably little of the present fire service will remain,
and it consist basically of a network organization.
To make this transformation towards 2040, the first step was defined in a strategic
program with innovations until 2015. So we are now in the middle of this process, and a
lot has been achieved already. One of the main features is that we have now A Dutch Fire
Service, where two years ago we were an association of 350 fire services.
Sheet 4
One of the core innovations is a new way to approach fire safety. We called it a new fire
safety doctrine, which is based on the bow tie model.
The main changes are
- move to the left hand side of the bow tie: which includes more emphasis on real
fire prevention
- innovate fire suppression
- professionalize, we need to learn more from living fires and we need more
knowledge about our core business
sheet 5
I will focus on the left hand side now
Sheet 6:
The movement to the left comprises basically three headlines:
- improve fire safety awareness.
- Improve resilience
- Emphasis the self responsibility of citizens and support this by giving them
perspective gained by knowledge
Sheet 7 en 8:
Where it comes to innovation of fire suppression the goals are
- accommodate to the new fire behaviour phenomena
- make fire suppression safer for our FF and more flexible and effective than before
- make clear what we can do and what we cannot do
We had to rethink our fire safety doctrines
Sheet 9 en 10:
And on the very right hand side we implement measures to learn more from real fires by
starting a Fire investigation team, organizing learning Arena’s and improve knowledge
sharing within the fire service. Of course research is also a part of this movement.
Sheet 11 en 12:
So we are rethinking our doctrines, as far as we had them of course…
We just saw the new fire safety doctrine on the strategic level, but of course this needs
translation into the tactical level and the operational level.
We are in the middle of this process now, and we support this process by carrying out
research.
Sheet 13:
The process of changing the Fire Service is very difficult and we use various ways to
involve the field in this process including social media and expert meetings. A special
process team is directing this. If you are in charge of a fire service you will admit that
this is a major challenge!
Sheet 14:
One of the most catching achievements until this moment is that we added two new fire
intervention tactics to the existing ones. You might be familiar with the normal way to
extinguish fires: which is going inside the building and put water on it. If that is not
possible anymore, fire service will stay outside and prevent fire spread to the next
building.
We added an offensive outside attack…. Attack the fire inside from outside the building
and we added a defensive inside attack.
Sheet 15:
Both new, but also the old tactics require more knowledge about fire behaviour and the
effects of possible techniques. So, more research is needed, for the fire suppression
tactics, but also for the other movements in the new vision.
Sheet 16:
In order to support the development and implementation of the new vision we founded
a Fire Service Scientific Board, and we defined prioritized research subjects.
I will now come to answer the question of our 5 prioritized research subjects
1. not suprisingly, the first one is fire behaviour, innovation of fire suppression
techniques and fire investigation
2. At this moment we are carrying out experimental tests to compare various
innovative methods in order to find techniques to perform the offensive outside
attack
3. The second one is research into groups of citizens that are most at risk to have a
fire in their home and get hurt by it. When identified, we want to know how we
can stimulate them to live fire safe
4. The third research subject is how to utilize and optimize citizen resilience. We
know that normal citizens will not flee, they will not wait for the fire sevice, and
we know that in case of large incidents we will not be able to do everything on
our own
5. The fourth research subject is how to find new volunteers how to stimulate
people to join us for certain activities and how to change our organization to
welcome them most effectively
6. The last subject for research is cultural change in the fire service. We need to
change culture to be able to carry out our new activities. But how can we do this
most effectively?
Sheet 17:
So this sheet summarizes out priorities
Sheet 18:
Last but not least I would like to mention our activities to try to exchange knowledge on
a European level and cooperate with others on this subject. We noticed that a lot of
knowledge is already there, but it is hardly available because a lot of research is not
published or not published in English and there for we cannot find it eg on the internet.
It would be of great help if every European fire service would publish at least an abstract
of their research in English.
Sheet 19: I thank you for your attention.