Fighting fires and fatigue
The demands of tackling fires mean emergency crews need to keep up their fitness to ensure they can deal with the mental and physical load. Heavy equipment, high temperatures, stressful environments and the burden of personal protective equipment all contribute to the challenges they face.
But while exercise can play a vital part in helping them prepare and keep fit, training can also make them more fatigued when a call-out happens. Researchers have explored the effect this physical fatigue can have by using a laboratory-based shipboard firefighting simulation.
Compared to those who started when fully rested, participants who were fatigued from previous exercise took 7.2% longer to complete the task – and those who were both fatigued and exposed to high heat required 8.5% more time. The latter two categories also performed more poorly in tests of peak strength.
The research, published in the journal Applied Ergonomics, said: “Completing a bout of physically fatiguing exercise prior to a shipboard firefighting simulation impaired performance, with further perceptual and physiological strain when heat stress was added. Although completion times did not significantly differ between Fatigue and Fatigue + Heat conditions, participants experienced greater perceived exertion, average heart rate, and thermal discomfort when exposed to heat stress. Physical fatigue also had residual effects on muscular strength, as evident in a reduced peak force in both upper and lower body isometric strength tests.”
As shipboard fires are more unpredictable than land-based fires, the study authors acknowledged that forces at sea could not rely on call-volume timing – scheduling exercise for periods when call volume is traditionally low – to manage fatigue.
Instead, the report suggested strategies such as rotational duty cycles, mandatory recovery periods and fitness/recovery monitoring using wearable devices such as heart rate monitors. Conducting routine firefighting drills in fatigued states could help personnel adapt to the additional challenges of operating while fatigued.
