New Dress Regs 🤣

[daftandbarmy]

Yeah, lots of scenarios where it could be a problem; people can get cut off from their section base due to the damage, injured in the initial accident etc, so if you don't have redundancy for your initial response you are pretty much hooped. And even best case people will lose their seal anyway, and when that happens they generally only have enough time to evacuate, and there is a delay when you are waiting for a replacement.

FRE was a more recent example, but some people could only do one run and were exhausted, and a few folks were hyperventilating. Totally understandable, and hoping we'll finally get the live fire trainers up and running next year so that we can shake that out ashore and help people get over that hump.

Has been more progress in the last year and a bit on that than the previous decade, so that will help, but with other things on aging ships affecting smoke control and other basics, the risk/severity keeps going up and the BGHs want to keep running the old ships indefinitely.

And, you know, train people to be as fit as firefighters... at least.

 

[Navy_Pete]

And, you know, train people to be as fit as firefighters... at least.

It's not really even fitness, but we can't expect basically amateurs with a bit of training to do the same thing as professionals who do something full time, especially when they have far more sustained practice and realistic training.

To be fair, that's a pretty high fitness standard, but a lot of it is very specific to actually wearing the SCBA and controlling your breathing. Doing that for a half day once a year doesn't do that, but the firefighters do things like run on treadmills while on air (or play ball hockey, or otherwise do some kind of exercise) to train that part of it. So even really fit people who have the basic Navy training will not have the time in SCBA to be able to control their breathing the same way.

For context, the people that tend to do multiple runs on our ship fires are the ones that spend a lot of time in SCBA, so they've done things like instructor at the fire schools, a lot of time as helo crash rescue (they regularly practice), or similar. Most other people are 'one and done', and adrenaline dump seems to be a big part of that.

And the combination of fire, black smoke and the shear noise (especially in a steel box) triggers all kinds of lizard brain things, so the pucker factor is huge. Our current trainers are propane based with white, theatrical smoke (when the building itself isn't burning) which doesn't get anywhere near as hot. Not sure what the army equivalent would be; maybe being under live fire for the first time in an actual combat zone, and only training with blanks?

 

[daftandbarmy]

Not sure what the army equivalent would be; maybe being under live fire for the first time in an actual combat zone, and only training with blanks?

In the Infantry we know we can never accurately recreate the conditions of war, in peacetime, so we focus on high levels of fitness training - and fairly gruelling field exercises - to help prepare troops for the physical and mental rigours they may face.

Lessons learned the hard way: Fat, soft people die when the shit hits the fan

I've only done really basic 'confined space' fire suppression once, with a mask on in the dark when I thought I was pretty fit, and it was still bloody hard work.

I'll assume that a ship's company can't rely on a handful of 'experts' to do all the work during a big fire, or mass damage scenario, so increasing fitness standards on ship might be something to think about in terms of mitigating your risks.

Fat leaders tend to downplay this need though, of course, because they know they would never be able to meet the standard.

 

[Good2Golf]

Yeah, lots of scenarios where it could be a problem; people can get cut off from their section base due to the damage, injured in the initial accident etc, so if you don't have redundancy for your initial response you are pretty much hooped. And even best case people will lose their seal anyway, and when that happens they generally only have enough time to evacuate, and there is a delay when you are waiting for a replacement.

FRE was a more recent example, but some people could only do one run and were exhausted, and a few folks were hyperventilating. Totally understandable, and hoping we'll finally get the live fire trainers up and running next year so that we can shake that out ashore and help people get over that hump.

Has been more progress in the last year and a bit on that than the previous decade, so that will help, but with other things on aging ships affecting smoke control and other basics, the risk/severity keeps going up and the BGHs want to keep running the old ships indefinitely.

Is/will there be a BoI for the FRE fire?

 

[SeaKingTacco]

In the Infantry we know we can never accurately recreate the conditions of war, in peacetime, so we focus on high levels of fitness training - and fairly gruelling field exercises - to help prepare troops for the physical and mental rigours they may face.

Lessons learned the hard way: Fat, soft people die when the shit hits the fan

I've only done really basic 'confined space' fire suppression once, with a mask on in the dark when I thought I was pretty fit, and it was still bloody hard work.

I'll assume that a ship's company can't rely on a handful of 'experts' to do all the work during a big fire, or mass damage scenario, so increasing fitness standards on ship might be something to think about in terms of mitigating your risks.

Fat leaders tend to downplay this need though, of course, because they know they would never be able to meet the standard.

I did the old, diesel fire house, back in the day, with Chemox and the silver rainsuit for protection. Having balls of flame running over your head is surreal, while you try to knock down an oil pan fire with pure water. The heat and noise are unbelievable.

 

[Halifax Tar]

I did the old, diesel fire house, back in the day, with Chemox and the silver rainsuit for protection. Having balls of flame running over your head is surreal, while you try to knock down an oil pan fire with pure water. The heat and noise are unbelievable.

That was a fire trainer.

 

[dimsum]

I did the old, diesel fire house, back in the day, with Chemox and the silver rainsuit for protection. Having balls of flame running over your head is surreal, while you try to knock down an oil pan fire with pure water. The heat and noise are unbelievable.

TORCH and TUMULT.

Those were the days...

 

[SeaKingTacco]

TORCH and TUMULT.

Those were the days...

I am not going to lie…I was scared shitless Doing the down hatch drill into to the “engine room”. You could not see a thing to due the heavy black smoke and everything was greasy slippery. If you wiped out going down the ladder you were going to suffer a significant and life altering injury. If you lived.

 

[Rd651]

It's not really even fitness, but we can't expect basically amateurs with a bit of training to do the same thing as professionals who do something full time, especially when they have far more sustained practice and realistic training.

To be fair, that's a pretty high fitness standard, but a lot of it is very specific to actually wearing the SCBA and controlling your breathing. Doing that for a half day once a year doesn't do that, but the firefighters do things like run on treadmills while on air (or play ball hockey, or otherwise do some kind of exercise) to train that part of it. So even really fit people who have the basic Navy training will not have the time in SCBA to be able to control their breathing the same way.

For context, the people that tend to do multiple runs on our ship fires are the ones that spend a lot of time in SCBA, so they've done things like instructor at the fire schools, a lot of time as helo crash rescue (they regularly practice), or similar. Most other people are 'one and done', and adrenaline dump seems to be a big part of that.

And the combination of fire, black smoke and the shear noise (especially in a steel box) triggers all kinds of lizard brain things, so the pucker factor is huge. Our current trainers are propane based with white, theatrical smoke (when the building itself isn't burning) which doesn't get anywhere near as hot. Not sure what the army equivalent would be; maybe being under live fire for the first time in an actual combat zone, and only training with blanks?

Well said Navy Pete !

 

[Humphrey Bogart]

In the Infantry we know we can never accurately recreate the conditions of war, in peacetime, so we focus on6 high levels of fitness training - and fairly gruelling field exercises - to help prepare troops for the physical and mental rigours they may face.

Lessons learned the hard way: Fat, soft people die when the shit hits the fan

I've only done really basic 'confined space' fire suppression once, with a mask on in the dark when I thought I was pretty fit, and it was still bloody hard work.

I'll assume that a ship's company can't rely on a handful of 'experts' to do all the work during a big fire, or mass damage scenario, so increasing fitness standards on ship might be something to think about in terms of mitigating your risks.

Fat leaders tend to downplay this need though, of course, because they know they would never be able to meet the standard.

Can you do it when it actually counts? What a tough question to ask D&B.... meanwhile I know NWOs that can't even fit in bunker gear.

 

[FSTO]

I am not going to lie…I was scared shitless Doing the down hatch drill into to the “engine room”. You could not see a thing to due the heavy black smoke and everything was greasy slippery. If you wiped out going down the ladder you were going to suffer a significant and life altering injury. If you lived.

I don't think I ever had a full lung when I fought fires at the old school. It was amazing nobody got serious hurt or killed there.

 

[ff149]

I was lucky, I did the old damage control school before I remustered to firefighter. For our trades training we tried to ensure the fires were really smokey so that the students could feel like a fire could actually feel like. We had the odd student who had to go into another trade because they couldn't deal with the conditions in the burn buildings.

I know firefighters where sometimes our own worse enemy while we were posted on ships, I witnessed both our people being jerks and us being ignored when we tried to bring up a different way to look at things. I did have to have a conversation with the EO after a table top exercise about a fire, the plan the ship came up with would have probably killed two of the three attack teams. When I brought this to there attention they were said "well we see the fire departments doing that on TV all the time", basically they were using a defensive tactic while they still had people doing an offensive tactic. This is a major no no in our word. Luckily they listened and decided not to do that plan.

I actually enjoyed my time on the ship, looking back at it, it was one of the best times in my military career.

 

[Navy_Pete]

In the Infantry we know we can never accurately recreate the conditions of war, in peacetime, so we focus on high levels of fitness training - and fairly gruelling field exercises - to help prepare troops for the physical and mental rigours they may face.

Lessons learned the hard way: Fat, soft people die when the shit hits the fan

I've only done really basic 'confined space' fire suppression once, with a mask on in the dark when I thought I was pretty fit, and it was still bloody hard work.

I'll assume that a ship's company can't rely on a handful of 'experts' to do all the work during a big fire, or mass damage scenario, so increasing fitness standards on ship might be something to think about in terms of mitigating your risks.

Fat leaders tend to downplay this need though, of course, because they know they would never be able to meet the standard.

Fitness would absolutely make a big difference for sure, I guess I just meant that aside from being fit you also need to practice air management with the SCBA on (and be generally comfortable with the harness etc), and getting exposed to real conditions on training helps not panic when you're against the real thing (which also seems to happen a lot when you are in rough seas to add an extra challenge).

The fire fighter fitness test is a pretty high standard as well; it used to count as an exemption for the old PT test and not sure what it is for the FORCE test equivalent, but aside from the weirdness that is the 'stop drop and jazz hands' bit, I don't see why anyone that can't pass that one wouldn't crush the FORCE test.

Not everyone needs to be a marathon runner or Brogames champ for what we expect them to do for firefighting, but I think we need to do some ongoing practical practice with people in the SCBA more than once a year just to be used to it, and you can incorporate it into PT anyway fairly easily. The cylinders need to get refreshed every so often anyway so the air isn't 'stale' so may as well actually use the air instead of dumping/refilling unused bottles.

 

[mariomike]

The solution? Go ahead grow that beard.

Then have an ex where they need to mask quickly and introduce them to Mr CS.

We wore Scott Air-Paks during high-rise evacuations.

Grooming standards required us to be clean shaven. But, even without that, the Air-Pak included a warning about facial hair.

 

[AKa]

How is everyone else adapting to the new regs?

So far, I've only seen one person with brightly coloured hair (pink) and it appears she's letting it fade out. I expect the time and money required to maintain fancy colours is a disincentive.

I'm getting used to most of the changes and they mostly don't draw my attention anymore. But there are two things that bug me more and more. And I'm seeing them a lot.
- Long, puffy beards
- Loose, unsecured long hair in combats

Just like fingernails on a blackboard to me. Maybe I'm just a dinosaur?

I still notice grey shoes and trousers that don't appear to have ever met an iron. And don't get me started on people who can't get their pants hemmed at the correct length....

 

[Eye In The Sky]

They removed the "shall be polished" line from the dress regs for footwear.

Dress instructions | Section 2 Appearance - Canada.ca

Canadian Armed Forces Dress Instructions

www.canada.ca

Footwear

1. Shoes leathers, oxfords, pumps, flats and boots shall be clean at all times;
2. Footwear shall be laced as shown in Figure 2-2-6.
3. Overshoes, boots (cold weather), or black toe rubbers (optional) may be worn as required and shall be kept clean.

 

[OldSolduer]

They removed the "shall be polished" line from the dress regs for footwear.

Dress instructions | Section 2 Appearance - Canada.ca

Canadian Armed Forces Dress Instructions

www.canada.ca

Footwear

1. Shoes leathers, oxfords, pumps, flats and boots shall be clean at all times;
2. Footwear shall be laced as shown in Figure 2-2-6.
3. Overshoes, boots (cold weather), or black toe rubbers (optional) may be worn as required and shall be kept clean.

Can the laces of the footwear be rainbow, pink, purple or whatever one identifies that day?
Brown and black are so old….

 

[Halifax Tar]

How is everyone else adapting to the new regs?

So far, I've only seen one person with brightly coloured hair (pink) and it appears she's letting it fade out. I expect the time and money required to maintain fancy colours is a disincentive.

I'm getting used to most of the changes and they mostly don't draw my attention anymore. But there are two things that bug me more and more. And I'm seeing them a lot.
- Long, puffy beards
- Loose, unsecured long hair in combats

Just like fingernails on a blackboard to me. Maybe I'm just a dinosaur?

I still notice grey shoes and trousers that don't appear to have ever met an iron. And don't get me started on people who can't get their pants hemmed at the correct length....

Bad beards drive me nuts. And if a person cant grow one they should be told to shave.

And I see a lot of really patchy and unkept Beard's.

I'm seeing a lot of long hair on males... This means nothing to me, Ive had long hair for years.

And I think I'm one of the few who blouses boots anymore lol.

 

[Quirky]

So far, I've only seen one person with brightly coloured hair (pink) and it appears she's letting it fade out. I expect the time and money required to maintain fancy colours is a disincentive.

edit: holy hell sorry for the massive pic.

 

[CountDC]

Can the laces of the footwear be rainbow, pink, purple or whatever one identifies that day?
Brown and black are so old….

I agree!! Can I also have my daughter decorate my boots? That will be really something.