Regional Eastern European Fire Monitoring Center employees, Education and Research Institute of Forestry and Park Gardening, have conducted a training for the exclusion zone forest firefighters in the Chernobyl city.

 In order to prepare for the fire period of 2018, the staff of the Regional Eastern European Fire Monitoring Center (REEFMC) of the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine with the support of the US Forest Service, conducted a training on personal safety, weather assessment, decision making on strategy and tactics on extinguishing forest fires in the exclusion zone on the basis of the state special enterprise «EcoCenter» with using the Ukrainian version of the American developed Incident Respond Pocket Guide, which is used by US Forest Service Firefighters.

The purpose of the training was to increase level of readiness of the exclusion zone forest firefighters to the fire hazard period - to get acquainted with the best international experience of forest fire extinguishing, procedure of actions in the case of forest fires, prediction of fire behavior on the basis of weather, topographical conditions and characteristics of combustible materials, time of extinguishing forest fires, provision of first medical aid, choice of strategy and tactics of extinguishing fire.
During the training Sergiy Zibtsev presented and discussed the draft regulation on the operation of fire services of the Exclusion Zone at various fire hazard conditions, which was developed by Regional East European Fire Monitoring Center on the basis of decision of the V National Coordination Meeting on the Improvement of the Prevention and Forest Fires Suppression in the Exclusion Zone.

The training consisted of two parts: the first one - presentation of the theoretical material using developed Incident Respond Pocket Guide for forest firefighters (analog IRPG) and the best international experience in forest fire extinguishing; the second was consolidation of an acquired knowledge and practicing actions in the case of a forest fire in the exclusion zone.
Oleksandr Soshenskyi – REEFMC employee, senior lecturer at the Forestry Department; using world experience in forest fire suppression, presented key strategies to be used under certain conditions, as well as tactical methods, approaches and ways of forest fire extinguishing. Information presented in the report contained accents aimed at taking into account conditions of radiation pollution of the territory.

Vasyl Gumenyuk - REEFMC employee, senior lecturer at the Department of Forestry, presented peculiarities of fire behavior forecasting in the exclusion zone on the basis of weather, topographical conditions and characteristics of combustible materials using the developed pocket guide, and also presented the key aspects of firefighters’ safety during forest fire suppression and first aid basics.

The participants of the training were forest firefighters of SSE "Pivnichna Pushcha", which provide forests fire protection in the exclusion zone (EZ). A total of 27 people participated in the training, including forest firefighters (FFS) and forest guards who were involved in forest fire extinguishing on the territory of the EZ.
After presenting theoretical material, all participants were divided into three groups and given tasks that they had solved collectively and subsequently reported their decisions. The tasks included solving:
1) Personal safety actions during fire (weak low fires, middle low grass fires and severe grass / crown fires).
2) The procedure for forecasting the behavior and type of fire based on assessment of fire weather, relief and forest fuels data;
3) Based on the given task - the main characteristics of the conditional forest fire (location on the terrain, relief, compartment, section, area, type of fire, wind speed, level of radiation pollution, characteristics of forest combustible materials), taking into account available forces and means of FFS, it is necessary to choose strategy, tactics, approaches and methods of fire extinguishing.

Training agenda -  sites/default/files/u184/programa_27.03.18_v3.pdf

 Oleksandr Soshenskyi, Iryna Zibtseva,
Regional Eastern Europe Fire Monitoring Center