What UK and US firefighters say about Cobra
After a 32-year career in the West Midlands Fire Service, Carl Batchelor became a Senior Instructor for Cold Cut Systems in 2022, training firefighters in his UK homeland and the US. He explains his approach to training plus common questions from UK and US firefighters about the Cobra system.
How do you train firefighters on Cobra?
Although we have a standard portfolio of courses on our website, each course I deliver is different because it has to reflect the people who are in the classroom in front of you. We have a great training facility in Borås, Sweden, but I also like going to the customer’s backyard and training them there.
The US market was an interesting challenge because US firefighters approach firefighting differently to the UK and Europe – more so than the difference between the UK and Europe. The US are very keen on the capability of Cobra to deal with an electric vehicle battery fire.
You’ve got to do a little bit of research to find out the base knowledge of your students. The West Midlands Fire Service had quite a good understanding of fire science and fire behaviour. Some services won’t have that at all.
What are the most common questions you are asked about Cobra?
I’m often asked ‘What happens when people are inside? Can we use Cobra?’ Cobra will go through 15 inches (38 cm) of concrete in less than a minute, which is why safety is the priority when we do an instructor course. We couldn’t use Cobra if people were in that room. However, UK Government statistics show that in 95 percent of property fires we go to there’s nobody inside. And the five percent we do go to with people inside, half the time actually there’s no one left inside because they’ve got out or the original information was incorrect. For that two and a half percent of fires we go to with people inside Cobra might not be the tool to use.
Another common question concerns the standard 40-metre (131-foot) or 80-metre (262-foot) extendable hoses. Customers want to know how far they can extend it. We’ve done tests up on the 74th floor of a high rise using over 300 metres (984 feet) of hose and it still pierced through structural steel quite effectively, so it’ll pretty much go as high as you want it to.
What would you say are the key issues currently being discussed by fire services?
We need to look at the new risks such as electric vehicles. Probably every fire service in the world is scratching their heads, wondering how they deal with a lithium-ion battery fire in a vehicle that’s gone into thermal runway.
It’s no good putting water on it. Just like roofs are designed to hold out water, a lithium-ion battery is designed to do so too. Submerging the car in a skip of water or putting a blanket on it may help the situation but it’s not going to put the battery fire out.
We’ve still got combustion going on so we definitely need to get water in that battery and the way of doing that is using Cobra to pierce the battery. It goes through the vehicle floor into the battery pack and flows water through the battery pack.
Actually, the guys we trained in Arizona had predominantly bought Cobra for the electric vehicle capability though they’ve also used it on an attic fire. Six months after we trained them they successfully used it on a Tesla fire – the first ever US use of Cobra on a Tesla. That was satisfying!
Why should you attend training in Cobra? What are the benefits?
The benefits are that you’ll understand the system. We also cover fault-finding on the course.
People sometimes have issues, but probably 99.9 percent of the time it’s operator error; for example, not flushing out the system after you’ve used it so you have that abrasive mixture within the hose line in the system within the lance itself.
In the training we address how to flush out the system and related issues. It’s normally operator error, so it’s really important to listen to the training to understand this.
We give people a three-year qualification and after three years we refresh them in some of the things they might have forgotten or some of the developments that we might have had over that time.
Have you had good feedback from participants?
I’m pleased to say feedback is generally very positive. I try and keep the classroom part to a minimum and just get people out there. I like to see people show us what they’ve learned.
We’ll always set the challenges towards the end of the course, with a group of three students to run a course for another three students. And then we’ll have another three students watching that and train another three, and so on. That’s always well received.
Once we’ve delivered the training we don’t just leave them. If any issues crop up for them in the future, we’re there to support them.
