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CHEMOX vs Drager SCBA

I don't know what would be worse.  No gloves, that suit or the convection action on the noggin of all that metal in the helmet in the fire.  ouch.  :evil:
 
The 'advantage' of the Chemox was that a box of 6 canisters (6 hours of air) took up less than the volume of space for a single air bottle for any SCBA.

You could carry a huge amount of 'boxed air' for the Chemoxes in a relatively small space, and didn't have to worry about running HP Air compressors to provide breathable air.

When the disadvantages of the Chemox started to appear....the quick-start candles failing and blowing off Chlorine gas into my (and others) face.  The disposal of canisters started to cost the navy A LOT of money due to it being HAZMAT.

Then the black mold/lung issue started coming to the fore as well.

It was nigh time to dispose of them 20 years ago, but we kept them going because our procurement processes are....not simple....and this is a fleet-wide matter. 

Having been in the HAZMAT cleanup world, where we had the MSA Firehawks already in service on the ships, I would have been more than happy to see them continue in service, and be selected as the general replacement for the Chemox, alas, it went to Draeger, and we have, what is in my professional opinion, a lesser system than the Firehawk, but is still LEAPS AND BOUNDS ahead of the Chemox.

In a choice between Firehawk, Chemox, and Draeger, it'd be Firehawk first.  Alas, that wasn't to be, so we got 2nd place, which is effectively like replacing a Model T with a Porsche, instead of a Ferarri.

NS
 
Firehawk is one of the systems I am using. Modular, lightweight, simple.

The one and only "failing", if you can call it one, is that most people learn on Scott. So when they have a push to connect FM regulator it only screws them up and they fight with it.

The only way that the fringe companies keep hawking their wares is through massive discounts compared to the majors. Or a shortened procurement which leads to selection of the best/most available.
 
The big guys weren't interested in servicing their equipment, like Drager was.  That was really the big deciding factor over Scott and MSA.
 
Really? The major factor wasn't price?

Did procurement include a set of training for some maintenance in house?

To be clear: MSA and Scott do not have techs present for service, it's farmed out through folks like K&D Pratt, AGI, DBI, etc. along with some other outfits who service their own rental fleets; or the fire department angle where you had HRM dudes servicing and maintaining Scott and Survivair before their purchase of MSA (no clue if they still work in house or not, but it wouldn't shock me)

You've got me genuinely curious now.

While we are at it, isn't it MSA present in the fire halls? Does it differ between the divvy ones, say, at dockyard or Magazine Hill, and the one at Shearwater?
 
Perhaps, Jjt. But in all logic, is it possible that the reason MSA and Scott were not interested in servicing their equipment is that, as the most common products in use, there are sufficient numbers out there that an actual servicing industry exists for their models? If so, wouldn't that mean that the CAF could have tendered servicing out separately, possibly at a good price in view of the large number of potential bidders? [I guess that is so: Scott just beat me to it with the answer  :pirate:]

Anyway, my original point was trying to elicit wether the CAF had done the logical thing and bought the long duration SCBAs for the ships in view of the nature of their firefighting requirement (not a City FF force, so no support truck pulling up after an hour or so with spare bottles and the equipment to mass recharge the empty ones). I guess they haven't.

Now that I see the answers above, I am even more disturbed to find that the Daeger product they selected may not be the easiest to use of the available products on the market.

Considering that all shipboard personnel has to be trained in fire fighting, regardless of the fact that some trades are more specialized in it and are employed in such capacity first and foremost, and that this training is infrequent for most trades (NEQ, then annual quals of ships companies), I would have thought that ease of use would be an important consideration.

But, hell, who am I to think that you would consider the end user and the actual environment for use when selecting a primary piece of gear for a function that can literally be the salvation of a billion dollars ship and 240+ lives. Much better to save  a few tens of thousands of dollars per ship. /SARC OFF
 
As l understand, price played a part, yes.  We were given the Canadian Friend price as they were wanting to clear off the model we bought because newer stuff was being rolled out.  But what really set the others apart was their reluctance in the servicing department.  It had to be part in parcel of the whole shooting match and only Drager were willing to give us all we wanted to get our business.

I have found in my portfolio that we as in the RCN and CAF are a minor bit player in our equipment buys when set against the big dogs, like our friends to the South.  In many ways, we're not worth the effort.  Just in the same vein we pay much more as consumers for our goods than the folks in the Ststes do for the same damn shit.  We're too small a market.

Getting back to SCBA, the Fire Halls use MSA.  Great gear and they would love for the navy to join forces.  The reluctance on our end is that the professional firefighter will use the bells and whistles and more importantly take care of it.  Your average duty watch OD or AB etc don't give a rats ass about the gear and it's more than we need in features for masks (for example).  Plus at say $1600 a mask X 60 masks X 12 CPF..... it just isn't an economical argument you can win with.  I'm not the SCBA guy, so l can only hear what's happening, not participate beyond voicing my opinion.

 
 
Lifecycle maintenance costs are an important element in any purchase decision - if the CAF bought the latest and greatest (fill in the blank) but was unable to keep operating it after a few years, we'd be no further ahead.

Any purchase decision has tradeoffs.  Making sure that leadership knows about what is and is not acceptable is the role of the SMEs involved.
 
Quite correct Dapaterson. Which is why I am surprised that the two points that would have been close to  top of my list of requirements don't seem to be there: ease of operation (for all its faults, Chemox were easy to operate - and even then some seamen still managed to screw it up) and long duration of air supply (if you have to keep changing and recharging the bottles all the time and at highly variable intervals, it's not good for proper rotation of personnel in the fight).
 
OK, so the CAF has a minimum of two platforms. Not a show stopper, and certain things are designed and legally bound to interoperability, like cylinders, but still not the wisest of moves.

I think that the servicing line of argument is a weak one, at best. If procurement knows what they are doing, and the piece of equipment being sought, then they'll know when something is serviced by the manufacturer, or when it is serviced by a manufacturer's representative in a third party capacity. I know what I just said.

Hell, I just did a quick search for Drager in Canada and it appears they "might" have a service centre somewhere in Nova Scotia, but it also shows "authorized service partners" The trap that I see having been sprung was that of purchase and service married together. It's a fallacy. The difference between Drager servicing a Drager set and AGI servicing something from MSA is minimal, at best.

If I currently ship most of my stuff to AGI, an authorized MSA service centre, for repair then I am not even permitted to get the training required to carry out the repairs and/or testing myself, it's kind of a protectionist thing. If AGI can't handle it then it goes to MSA in Toronto and the process, aside from the time it takes, is quite seamless.

I can speak somewhat at length about my experience with Scott and Survivair as well, having been a service tech for both. It was kind of like having a fast food franchise - you had to do things a certain way and stock certain items, but you were the business end of things. You have the same training and access to libraries as their own techs. And if your experience was overshadowed by an issue you had them to call upon from somewhere in the States - but given the life history of their particular products, their were not many issues you'd encounter that weren't easily researched and solved. I can think of only one in all the years I worked on and used them primarily.

As far as durability, I have never seen a set as bombproof as a Scott. I know near originals still running like a top. MSA is chugging right along behind them. I have some gripes, but think they'll get ironed out as generations evolve. In fact, I always have more worries about the one-off sets or those ones that are heavily discounted, compared to the big two. You get what you pay for, ultimately.

Finally, on duration, most of the SCBAs on market now have a max duration of 60 minutes. Yes, that is limiting, but cylinders are cheap, relatively and anyone can be trained to run a compressor or cascade. In fact, I am pretty sure some of the sisters to our huge Jordairs are in the dockyard.

[/bageek]
 
Scott said:
Finally, on duration, most of the SCBAs on market now have a max duration of 60 minutes. Yes, that is limiting, but cylinders are cheap, relatively and anyone can be trained to run a compressor or cascade. In fact, I am pretty sure some of the sisters to our huge Jordairs are in the dockyard.

But at sea, it is more than limiting, Scott.

Regardless of how cheap they are, there is a limit to how many cylinders you can have onboard a warship. If you have had a chance to sail on a destroyer or frigate, then you know how much stuff we already pack in every nook and cranny.

Then, you don't necessarily have the personnel to spend a lot of time on reload.

On a frigate in  the middle of fight, about 120 of your 225 personnel will be involved with fighting the ship, be it watching over some sensor or actually operating the weapons systems. Out of the 100 or so left, you have about 20 involved in running all the propulsion and machinery spaces and keeping track of the damage control/stability situation at the same time, so you are down to about 80 for first aid, fire fighting and damage control. That may seem a lot but not if after a hit you have to stop flooding in one or two compartment, fight a major fire while re-establishing power to an essential weapons system, such as the CWIS, because the sonovab***h airplane who did this is getting lined up for another pass, the whole while trying to evacuate about 15 casualties from the area hit and provide them with first aid.

having to over-rotate your personnel involved with the fire in such circumstances and spending time you don't really have on reloading the empties, is not necessarily something you can do.

The French navy have a backpack style breathing apparatus that gives them between two and three hours of air and recharge in five, so the materiel exists that can do it, and MSA has a four hour pack breathing apparatus. That's all I am saying. 
 
Oldgateboatdriver said:
But at sea, it is more than limiting, Scott.

Regardless of how cheap they are, there is a limit to how many cylinders you can have onboard a warship. If you have had a chance to sail on a destroyer or frigate, then you know how much stuff we already pack in every nook and cranny.

Then, you don't necessarily have the personnel to spend a lot of time on reload.

On a frigate in  the middle of fight, about 120 of your 225 personnel will be involved with fighting the ship, be it watching over some sensor or actually operating the weapons systems. Out of the 100 or so left, you have about 20 involved in running all the propulsion and machinery spaces and keeping track of the damage control/stability situation at the same time, so you are down to about 80 for first aid, fire fighting and damage control. That may seem a lot but not if after a hit you have to stop flooding in one or two compartment, fight a major fire while re-establishing power to an essential weapons system, such as the CWIS, because the sonovab***h airplane who did this is getting lined up for another pass, the whole while trying to evacuate about 15 casualties from the area hit and provide them with first aid.

having to over-rotate your personnel involved with the fire in such circumstances and spending time you don't really have on reloading the empties, is not necessarily something you can do.

The French navy have a backpack style breathing apparatus that gives them between two and three hours of air and recharge in five, so the materiel exists that can do it, and MSA has a four hour pack breathing apparatus. That's all I am saying.

No idea what it's like on a warship.

And your MSA 4 hour bitty is a closed circuit type BA, not a positive pressure type - just so we are clear. Comparing something with compressed air to another type of chemical oxygen set is apples and bowling balls.

Is it possible part of the reasoning behind open circuit SCBA was the inclusion of compressed breathable air at a CSA/NIOSH standard?

Genuinely curious.
 
Didn't want to edit in case someone is replying.

Here is what is linked as the French Navy's answer: http://www.matisec.com/products-services/respiratory-protection/supplied-air-respirators/scba-triplair

Still only 60 minute duration, just a slim design and perhaps lighter weight.
 
Good to known Scott.

I was told differently when I was on exchange on the French mine hunter Pégase. But that was from the petty officer I was questioning on the equipment, so he was obviously misinformed or plain wrong.

 
In practical terms, we carry enough bottles that if you are at the point where you need to refill them to keep teams going to fight a big fire you aren't doing anything else. At that point you have people dedicated to doing nothing but refilling the bottles, which you do when you swap the bunker gear for a new person.  It's really not that big a deal to remove it from the pack, although it is fidgety if you don't do it often.

The other big change is that there is no hesitation to use the fitted system and it's drilled into everyone that's the first thing they do, and they don't need permission for a confirmed fire to use it.  That's different than the 'gung ho hero' attitude I was taught a decade ago where you would save the halon, CO2, AFFF etc for when company comes over or something. With the fine water mist systems or some of the halon replacements its a lot more widely available anyway, but it's been recognized (the hard way) that the heat and smoke that will rapidly fill a space is much worse for electronics fitted in sealed boxes than some sprinkler water or AFFF. So your first team should be doing checks for casualties for evacuation and making sure it's contained, vice fighting a raging fire, if it was in a space with a fitted system.
 
Oldgateboatdriver said:
Good to known Scott.

I was told differently when I was on exchange on the French mine hunter Pégase. But that was from the petty officer I was questioning on the equipment, so he was obviously misinformed or plain wrong.

You might still have it, I just went with google-fu.

Navy_Pete said:
In practical terms, we carry enough bottles that if you are at the point where you need to refill them to keep teams going to fight a big fire you aren't doing anything else. At that point you have people dedicated to doing nothing but refilling the bottles, which you do when you swap the bunker gear for a new person.  It's really not that big a deal to remove it from the pack, although it is fidgety if you don't do it often.

The other big change is that there is no hesitation to use the fitted system and it's drilled into everyone that's the first thing they do, and they don't need permission for a confirmed fire to use it.  That's different than the 'gung ho hero' attitude I was taught a decade ago where you would save the halon, CO2, AFFF etc for when company comes over or something. With the fine water mist systems or some of the halon replacements its a lot more widely available anyway, but it's been recognized (the hard way) that the heat and smoke that will rapidly fill a space is much worse for electronics fitted in sealed boxes than some sprinkler water or AFFF. So your first team should be doing checks for casualties for evacuation and making sure it's contained, vice fighting a raging fire, if it was in a space with a fitted system.

Here's a question then, if you can indeed answer it without giving something verboten away: do you guys have to wait for a full muster before setting something like a Halotron or CO2 system off?
 
Scott said:
Hell, I just did a quick search for Drager in Canada and it appears they "might" have a service centre somewhere in Nova Scotia, but it also shows "authorized service partners" The trap that I see having been sprung was that of purchase and service married together. It's a fallacy. The difference between Drager servicing a Drager set and AGI servicing something from MSA is minimal, at best.

[/bageek]

Drager does have an service center in Burnside in Halifax.
 
Chief Stoker said:
Drager does have an service center in Burnside in Halifax.

Okey dokes.

And if Scott had a service centre in the same place you could still get the same service and repair from one of their partners. Same would apply to Drager.
 
Drager is a good product, robust and fairly easy to use with training. Ships do not have a problem recharging cylinders with the cascade system and personnel are designated at section base to do so. The bauer diesel compressor is slow and takes time to get the bottles up to max psi. CPF's and Kingston Class have the capability to fight sustained events. Thats from a Sea Training perspective.
 
CHEMOX never bothered me.  As a young Reservist, I once spent an entire summer at the DC School wearing one for several hours, virtually everyday.  I became so adept at using it that I could put it on and have air flowing faster by myself than if someone was trying to "help" me.  I also usually did this without using the quick start candle.  One of the big advantages I felt was that with everything in front, one could move around much easier in a shipboard environment.  I even managed to get through an escape hatch without collapsing the lungs - and I'm a big boy.  The only real advantage I saw in the Scott Pack was that the air tended to be cooler and "taste" better.
 
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