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- How much do you really know about fire?
Stop, drop, and roll that intro.
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all: "Our World"! [laughter]
- Fire can be helpful.
We can cook with it. It keeps us warm.
But it also can be very dangerous.
Firefighters here in our world work really hard to keep us safe.
- We are here 24 hours,
so in the event that a fire does come out
and we are dispatched to the fire,
we are alerted through our dispatching system.
So the tones will go off. [alarm ringing]
That is a NASA call.
[laughs] Over the sound speakers,
it'll tell us what type of call that we're gonna be going to.
Typically we have two minutes
to get out to our truck and out of the building en route to the call.
If it is a fire call, everybody but the driver
has put on all of their-- their bunker gear.
Strapped into our seats of our fire truck is our air packs.
So we sit in the seat, put our air packs on,
put our seatbelts on, and then we drive to the call,
lights and sirens.
It's not really possible to make anything truly fireproof.
There's fire-resistant and fire-retardant.
Fire-retardant is just different fibers or chemicals
that can help suppress something from catching fire,
versus fire-resistant,
like our fire gear that we wear,
our PPE.
It'll protect us to a certain extent.
So, when we get to the call, if it is truly a fire,
we will hook our hoses into the fire hydrant
and then pull the hoses and the nozzles off of our truck,
put our gear on,
put a mask on, and it attaches to our air pack.
Put our helmet on and we're ready to go inside the fire and fight it
or, in the event that somebody does need to be rescued,
we go and also rescue them while we are also putting the fire out.
- Firefighters are in every community and help is just a phone call away.
But did you know that NASA also works on fire safety?
We have Dr. Gary Ruff from NASA's Glenn Research Center
here in the hot seat to tell us all about fire.
Fire away!
- For a fire to start, you've got to have some kind of fuel,
something that can burn,
and oxygen present.
But probably most of all, you need some external heat
so that you can raise the temperature up to where reactions begin.
You suppress fires by removing one of those three things that I said it needed,
whether it was fuel, oxygen, or heat.
And so some of the fire suppression agents work by chemical means.
Essentially that stops the reaction between fuel and oxygen.
Other things like water, you know, tend to cool a surface,
and so that puts it out.
Or you can sometimes use a foam fire suppressant,
which makes a layer between the fuel and the oxygen,
so essentially oxygen doesn't get to it.
In a space fire, you still need the same kinds of things,
you know, heat and fuel and--and oxygen.
You generally need some type of flow to bring oxygen to it.
And that causes it to have a little bit different shape.
One of the big things that I've been working on
in the last several years
is the Saffire series of experiments.
We wanted to see how fast those would burn
and just some of the burning characteristics.
- Fire acts differently in space than it does here on our world.
But it's still dangerous.
If there's a fire here on Earth, we call the fire department.
But what can astronauts do if there's a fire on a spacecraft?
Is there a space fire department?
- Unfortunately, there is no space fire department.
That's why we have to give them tools
so that they can detect a fire, fight the fire,
and recover from the fire while they're living in their house.
You want to be able to detect the fire
as quickly as you can,
before bad things happen and it harms some of the equipment.
You want to give the crew a way to protect themselves,
meaning whether it's breathing apparatus
or, you know, masks,
and then you want to give them some way to suppress it,
to fight the fire, to put it out.
Once they do that, then you start the process of cleaning up.
And so all of those aspects--
detection, personal protection, suppression, and post-fire clean-up--
are all some of the technologies that we work on.
Right now, as we're talking about exploration missions
and people working on the Orion capsule,
we're working with those people to make sure that they have
the right smoke detectors and the right breathing apparatus
and the right clean-up mechanisms and the right fire suppressants.
- NASA is doing a lot to keep the astronauts safe
on the International Space Station and as they explore farther into space.
But can any of that fire safety help protect us from fires here on Earth?
- Step one is don't play with matches
or fire or anything without adult supervision.
Have a smoke detector in your home.
Go home and make sure your smoke detector works.
Make sure that you have batteries in your smoke detector.
When you change your clock,
change your batteries on your smoke detector.
If you have gas in your home, make sure you have a carbon monoxide alarm,
so that the alarm can go off in the event of any sort of gas leak.
Do an EDITH drill in your home.
Something we teach, it's called the EDITH.
So it's Exit Drills in the Home.
So teaching kids and not just kids but anybody in the family
to, if you hear a smoke alarm going off, to immediately exit the home.
And always remember to shut the door.
Shutting the door will stop the flow of a fire.
- The more you know about fire, the safer you'll be.
I'm Abby. See you next time in "Our World."