Imagine the scene… A firefighter enters a burning building in full self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) with three other crew members. Visibility is extremely poor: it is dark and the room is thick with smoke. The mission is to quickly and thoroughly search for occupants. He holds up his compact LUNAR device and the edge detection thermal technology helps to identify the outline of doors, windows, stairs and a number of obstacles to navigate past.

As he moves from room to room searching for signs of movement from civilians on the thermal display, he keeps an eye out for hot spots or ventilation points. Suddenly an alarm sounds and an alert is triggered on the screen. A teammate has stopped moving and could be in distress. The LUNAR device identifies her and indicates she is less than 20 metres away. Swinging the device round slowly, LUNAR guides the firefighter, showing the most efficient direction to take, and as the firefighter moves towards his teammate the signal strengthens. Soon the thermal imaging reveals a casualty on the ground. Fellow crew members have also been alerted and the team are able to work together to immediately take their colleague to safety. Incident command has been monitoring the firefighters remotely via LUNAR’s connection to the cloud-based platform, FireGrid, and have already organised the provision of immediate medical assistance. All relevant data from the LUNAR system is recorded and available for post-incident analysis.

 

Read the full article on our digital issue, page 31-33.

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