Bad Air

[eagleray2003]

Have a look at the headline on Canada.com todays version. Ottawa edition, apparantly some of these tanks were filled at local scuba shops who had fill contracts.

 

[Tom R]

Before we get off on another wild and crazy discussion on this. Read the threads by Pufferfish and Bubbleboy, lots of information there. Pufferfish's thread Edit note: Link to Pufferfish's thread added by DivingGal (Thanks Tom)



This is the story eagleray2003 referred to.

http://www.canada.com/search/story.aspx?id=f9b61c50-3722-4647-9d0d-83c405538328

and the article states that the compressors were up to standard.

Tom R

 

[Groundhog246]

I don't see anywhere in the article that mentions LDS doing the fills. Around here the FD have their own compressors and it's my understanding that is the norm.
It also sounds like they DO NOT do annual visuals on their SCBA tanks.

"We were having failures on the air packs and were trying to find what the causes were. Little did we know a big part of it was because our air was bad," Mr. St. Denis said. "We were scrambling to identify what was going on because a lot of guys were potentially endangered by air packs failing, and in so doing, we came across what was in the bottles."

 

[JJ1]

OFD had known about the problem for a while (9+ months I believe) They filled all there own tanks from compressors in the different fire houses. When they discovered the problem they went to having ? station(s) filling tanks from a "clean" fill station and support vans ferrying full bottles to the fire houses and fire sceenes should they need more air. Even some of the larger rural FD's have there own cascade systems.......I highly doubt that anything execpt a small rural FD is going to use an LDS to fill bottles at.......even at that they would most likely go to a larger FD to get fills.

I believe Ottawa was also in the process of switching from there current SCBA systems to a newer style that was the same city wide........not sure if any of the new bottles were contaminated.......or if the switch was initiated by there relization that they had alot of bad bottles on there hands.......or maybe they were just trying to replace all the different brands with 1 model after amalgamation of all the rural and city fire depts......


edit : (if you read this before...........info's been challenged........)

 

[Narced-on-Land]

On the topic of bad air, does anyone out there use/recommend those in-line filters that go on your regulator hose??