Air Packs

Last night's training involved donning air packs.

There are a few steps involved in putting an airpack on. Some of these can be done in different orders, but my sequence was:

1) Put on the pack. It's like a backpack, with the air cylinder fastened to the frame. It's got a waist strap, too, so that the 30-40lbs of weight rest on your hips, not your shoulders.

2) Put on the face piece. This has webbing that wraps around your head, and 4 straps that you tighten to secure it to your head, and create an air-tight seal.

3) Attach the regulator to the face piece. In our case (MSA), the regulator starts off attached to a clip on the waist belt, and you unclip it from that and clip it into an opening in front of your mouth, (on the outside of the face piece). At this point, you should check your seal by breathing in; since you haven't opened the air yet, you should get nothing coming into the face piece around the outside.

4) Now, (before you run out of breath), turn on the air cylinder by reaching around the bottom-right side of the backpack and opening the valve. If you're mask is tight enough, air flows into the face piece when you breathe in, but doesn't leak out the sides. (These masks are positive-pressure, meaning it provides just slightly more than 1 atmosphere of pressure, rather than requiring you to pull air in via lung effort; this makes it safer in the case of a mask leak, meaning smoke won't come in when you breathe in.)

5) Now that you're breathing air, pull your hood up over the face piece, and put on your helmet and gloves. Done.

Now, do all that in 60 seconds. Yeah, it's about as hard as it sounds. The point of doing it timed is to make sure you're comfortable doing it, and can be ready in an emergency situation. Like the 60 seconds to put on gear, in real life, you'll most likely have more time than that, but you need to be comfortable with what you're doing.

Now, the frustration. I'd never touched an airpack before. Apparently, I was one of two or three in the class in that situation, and it just didn't occur to the instructor to ask. So I figured most of the above out by myself. Several things tripped me up along the way, but I worked them out as I went; the pressure was that each attempt was timed, and I didn't get to work my way fully through the process before we were told (as a class) to start over.

On the positive side, each attempt got easier, and on the try where I forgot my hood, I got everything else on in the 60 seconds, with a bit of fumbling around. So I'm pretty confident that I'll get it worked out for next class. And we've got a night off next week to be able to practice at our station as well. Just one more thing to master.