NEAFC 31st Annual Conference.pdf - New England Association of ...

NEW ENGLAND ASSOCIATION OF FIRE CHIEFS
company doesn’t recognize on which side it does start, and,. our fire pumps are the same
whether in Canada or the United States. We had a most interesting week of it. I
will show you one album which will be passed around, and also I will show you some
of the problems we discussed in our Federal Forums, of how we would attack first on
enemy action and--probably more important--just how big, and how big and what a
problem those fires were.
Until y~u-sit back and think in. todiay’s warfare you don’t worry a,bc.ut a fire at
60 Smith Street, nor do you worry about one ,block of a village, or worry about the
city blcck, but yo u have massed fires under modern warfare ten or twelve miles around
the perimeter, and you have to use equipment, manpower and water in amounts and
quantities almost unbelievable.
Even in World War II they had fairly large fires. There were 3,000 pumpers
at one time in London. That is a fair number of pumpers. The British Fire Brigade
had 341,000 men and women fully trained firefighters. That is a big :brigade.
You needi a lot of equipment to fight any type of fire that a real emergency, such
as an ato.mid attack,’would cost. I worked with the British last fall and we went into
it very fully, as far as the Canadians and Americans were ccncerned, i~nd we came to
the conclusion that you only probably have 700 pumpers, all of 600 gallons or over.
You need water supplies at the rate of 200,000 gallons per minute--ar, d that is a lot of
water, and ycu are not playing with one or two brigades or one or two pieces of equip,
ment, as some days it gets worse an~t Some days it gets better. The fire people have to
.be prepared to do their part because every authority in the English-speaking world
agrees that 80 per cent of damage is caused by fire. It is not caused by radiation of
~he atomic bomb. Fire is just the same whether it started by incendiary or atomic
bomb, or the type of fire you fight every day.
The only difference is that under enemy attack it is a big fire in proportion. We
haven’t been accustomed to, deal with this, and only those people in yc.ur communities
struck by the cyclone a few weeks ago know how in a few moments a community can
be devastated.
That is why today when we are not in the midst o.f a war we have to get our houses
in order and do things we never thought of doing before.
One of the new principles that will .be talked o£ is getting rid of all wooden fences
and outbuildings in our modern cities because that is the sort of thing that ignites from
an atomic flash, and no fire department could possibly do it. In the week we met in
To.ronto we first discussed the various effects of atomic warfare, the atomic .bomb; we
discussed the heat effect. We discussed the blaze effect and the radiation effect. ~Those
are all important as far as the men in the fire service are concerned.
Probably most of the group here have seen the film taken on March 17 in Nevada,
at which Chief McAlpine was present, and you saw where pictures appeared in most
magazines. It shows how completely devastated; it shows how cc,mpletely devastated at
3,~00 feet from the bomb zero; where another house had quite a bit of damage at 7,000
feet--that is a mile and a half. Radiation effect was so serious they couldn’t go near
those houses even six hours after the bomb went off. What are you going to do if you
can’t fight a fire for six hours after it is started? It is a problem that is not easily solved.
That is why the fire services need to study all the effects of today’s problems in modern
warfare--and if we are prepared, that is our best hope; probably our only hope o~f avoiding
the horrors of modern warfare on this continent.