The United Kingdom Fire Service International Search and Rescue Team (UK ISAR) is on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to respond to an accident or disaster anywhere in the world. The team is composed of firefighters and other specialist rescue personnel working within the UK emergency services.

Disasters and accidents can happen at any time and anywhere in the world, often without warning. There is a need for professional teams that can deploy rapidly and undertake effective search and rescue operations. The UK Fire Service Search and Rescue Team is one of the teams registered with the United Nations and The European Community Mechanism that can provide such a service. The team has, over the last 18 years, successfully carried out search, rescue and relief missions around the world.

Team structure
There are 13 UK ISAR teams in the UK and they operate a rota system based on two groups providing 24 hour cover for National and International deployments:

• Group A   – Grampian, Hampshire, Leicestershire, West Midlands, Cheshire, South Wales
• Group B – Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Mid & West Wales, Essex, Kent, West Sussex

The team were deployed to the Pakistan earthquake in 2005

Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service UK ISAR
There are 25 team members in Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service’s UK ISAR. They are headed up by Peter Stevenson, who is also the Deputy Borough Commander for Rochdale. The 25 members are split in three teams.

The role of the team is to respond to a request from the Government with personnel and equipment to an international disaster such as an earthquake. When on international call, we will send a team of six including the team leader from one of the groups and a Group Commander to act as the Operations Commander or Deployment Commander in charge of all Fire and Rescue Service UK ISAR.

The intention is for the team to be arriving in the affected country within 24 hours of the disaster occurring and be able to be self sufficient for periods up to 10 days. In order to achieve this the team members have to be fully trained firefighters who have been selected as suitable for the work and are fully inoculated for working overseas. Additional training over and above that normally required for firefighters is required for all team members.

The three group rota ensures that if a team is deployed overseas then arrangements are in place to continue to provide a USAR response within Greater Manchester or on a National deployment.

Equipment
Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service UK International Search and Rescue Team take a large quantity of equipment that is specially packaged for air transportation. The equipment includes the full range of heavy rescue equipment generally used for Urban Search and Rescue Operations with additional items that allow the team to operate in extreme conditions. This includes various specialist tools but also camping equipment, food/water and survival items to ensure the team is completely self sufficient for 7 – 10 days if required.

Capabilities/resources/equipment
Search and Rescue in collapsed structures

• Search dogs
• Search cameras with probes
• Delsar audio monitoring
• Communications probes
• Concrete drilling equipment
• Lightweight portable cutting equipment
• Hot cutting equipment
• Shoring equipment
• Rope rescue
• GPS

Skills
The team members have a range of skills utilising:

• Search and rescue
• Collapsed structures
• Communications
• Disaster awareness
• Medical
• Environment
• Humanitarian
• Training
• Incident security

news source – http://www.manchesterfire.gov.uk/our-emergency-response/uk-fire-services-search-and-rescue-team-.aspx

18 January 2010

At 01:40hrs on 18 January 2010 fire crews from Blackley, Chadderton, Oldham and Broughton fire stations were called to a fire in a two storey shop building at Lewis Builders Merchant, Mills Hill Road, Mills Hill, Middleton, Manchester.

On arrival fire crews were faced with a rapidly developing fire in a two storey shop building in the yard of the builders merchants. Twenty fire fighters wearing breathing apparatus worked extremely hard to extinguish the blaze using five jets. The fire was quickly brought under control, however there was extensive fire and smoke damage to the two storey building.

The fire will be subject of an investigation by special Fire Scene Investigators and the Police however the cause of the fire is thought to be suspicious.

source – http://www.manchesterfire.gov.uk/our-emergency-response/latest-incidents/18-january-2010—fire-in-a-two-storey-shop-building-middleton.aspx

United Kingdom – Firefighters had a lucky escape when a gas cylinder exploded as they arrived to tackle an allotment arson attack. Several cylinders were engulfed in flames, while two caravans were totally destroyed at the gardens at the rear of Lime Road, Normanby, Middlesbrough.

And the swift actions of fire crew in damping down two sheds saved livestock from being burned alive.

Trevor Burns, who has an allotment at the site, said: “This is just the latest in a spate of thefts and vandalism attacks. The darker nights seems to bring the worst out of people.

“This time it was only property that was destroyed, but it could have been a lot worse if the sheds that had the animals in had gone up properly.”

Three crews attended the blaze just after 10pm on Sunday and were confronted by the flames engulfing the caravans and the sound of exploding gas cylinders.

A Cleveland Fire Brigade spokesman said: “There were six cylinders involved in the fire, one of which exploded as the crews arrived, and the two caravans were destroyed.

“There was a small fire in one of the sheds that contained livestock and officers used buckets of water to extinguish the flames.”

Meanwhile, investigations are continuing following a blaze at a special needs school in Redcar at the weekend.

A small fire broke out in a prefabricated building at Kirkleatham Hall School, at around 7am, on Sunday.

The rapid response of fire crews prevented the blaze from completely destroying the unit, which is next to the main school building.

Mary White, business manager at the school, said: “We feel very fortunate that the fire did not take hold properly, otherwise the building would have been destroyed.

“We are unsure about the cost of the fire, but some equipment, including computers, has been smoke damaged.

“It has affected our 24 further education students who were told not to come into school. Hopefully, by tomorrow, we will be able to accommodate them in the main body of the school while some will be catered for at other sites.”

A Cleveland Police spokeswoman confirmed investigations were continuing into the cause of both fires.

(c) 2009 Northern Echo. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.

Written by Graeme Hetherington

Article Source – http://www.firefightingnews.com/article.cfm?articleID=61760

Science and technology reporter, BBC News

A promising push toward a novel, biologically-inspired “chemical computer” has begun as part of an international collaboration.

The “wet computer” incorporates several recently discovered properties of chemical systems that can be hijacked to engineer computing power.

The team’s approach mimics some of the actions of neurons in the brain.

The 1.8m-euro (£1.6m) project will run for three years, funded by an EU emerging technologies programme.

The programme has identified biologically-inspired computing as particularly important, having recently funded several such projects.

What distinguishes the current project is that it will make use of stable “cells” featuring a coating that forms spontaneously, similar to the walls of our own cells, and uses chemistry to accomplish the signal processing similar to that of our own neurons.

The goal is not to make a better computer than conventional ones, said project collaborator Klaus-Peter Zauner of the University of Southampton, but rather to be able to compute in new environments.

If one day we want to construct computers of similar power and complexity to the human brain, my bet would be on some form of chemical or molecular computing Frantisek Stepanek, Institute of Chemical Technology, Prague

“The type of wet information technology we are working towards will not find its near-term application in running business software,” Dr Zauner told BBC News.

“But it will open up application domains where current IT does not offer any solutions – controlling molecular robots, fine-grained control of chemical assembly, and intelligent drugs that process the chemical signals of the human body and act according to the local biochemical state of the cell.”

Lipids and liquids

The group’s approach hinges on two critical ideas.

First, individual “cells” are surrounded by a wall made up of so-called lipids that spontaneously encapsulate the liquid innards of the cell.

Recent work has shown that when two such lipid layers encounter each other as the cells come into contact, a protein can form a passage between them, allowing chemical signalling molecules to pass.

Second, the cells’ interiors will play host to what is known as a Belousov-Zhabotinsky or B-Z chemical reaction. Simply put, reactions of this type can be initiated by changing the concentration of the element bromine by a certain threshold amount.

The reactions are unusual for a number of reasons.

But for the computing application, what is important is that after the arrival of a chemical signal to start it, the cell enters a “refractory period” during which further chemical signals do not influence the reaction.

That keeps a signal from propagating unchecked through any connected cells.

Such self-contained systems that react under their own chemical power to a stimulus above a threshold have an analogue in nature: neurons.

Each neuron in our brains can be viewed as a chemical computer

“Every neuron is like a molecular computer; ours is a very crude abstraction of what neurons do,” said Dr Zauner.

“But the essence of neurons is the capability to get ‘excited’; it can re-form an input signal and has its own energy supply so it can fire out a new signal.”

This propagation of a chemical signal – along with the “refractory period” that keeps it contained within a given cell – means the cells can form networks that function like the brain.

‘Real chance’

Frantisek Stepanek, a chemical computing researcher at the Institute of Chemical Technology Prague in the Czech Republic, said the pairing of the two ideas was promising.

“If one day we want to construct computers of similar power and complexity to the human brain, my bet would be on some form of chemical or molecular computing,” he told BBC News.

“I think this project stands a real chance of bringing chemical computing from the concept stage to a practical demonstration of a functional prototype.”

For its part, the team is already hard at work proving the idea will work.

“Officially the project doesn’t start until the first of February,” said Dr Zauner, “but we were so curious about it we already sent some lipids to our collaborators in Poland – they’ve already shown the lipid layers are stable.”