10:10am Thursday 28th August 2008
Firefighters have teamed up with a research centre in Watford to help conduct experiments into the behaviour of fires.
Blue watch from Garston Fire Station, in St Albans Road, assisted scientists at BRE where they carried out research into how different building materials are affected by flames yesterday.
Watch commander Lee Bishop said: "They (BRE) do research into different building materials and how they are affected by fire, and how the fire and smoke travels. They've got a whole lot of experiments to do with cars and car fires in car ports and multi-storey car parks. They measure how the smoke travels and its behaviour.
"For anything else they can do maths calculations but you don't really know what happens until you do a practical demonstration.
"They usually ask us to stand-by incase anything gets out of hand or they want to stop the experiment. We work with them on quite a regular basis. It's quite interesting really."
When the crew is at BRE, in Bucknalls Lane, they are still on call via the radio system so are able to instantly respond to any emergencies.
Firefighter Bishop added that the experiments also offer good training opportunities for the crews themselves.
He said: "For people that are maybe are on the fire engine that day, if they've just joined it gives an insight into how a fire might behave in a given situation if it was for real."
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