Go to the Chippy

Granny and granddad headed home today, so it was Daddy day-care and I headed off to work.

I have mentioned before that I work closely with the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS).  Today I was part of a visit to the SFRS training facility at Clydesmill in Cambuslang. It is state of the art facility and incredibly impressive.  We started with a demonstration of a chip pan fire – does anyone still use a chip pan nowadays?  Apparently the answer is yes – resulting in a fair number of fires.  The key message here was if you have one, throw it out and go to the chip shop!

The training centre is built like a town – there are houses, industrial units, a laboratory, a block of flats, a railway, a motorway, a church and a  technical rescue zone which includes a sewer, a silo, collapsed temporary seating, trenches and a crazy looking building which has been built to simulate an unsafe building that has collapsed – and probably much more that I can’t remember.  Just amazing and the guys who work there are totally passionate about their work and about training our fire fighters.  We were also introduced to the assessments that are used for incident commanders – to make sure they are up to scratch.  This is all about making critical life and death decisions in the face of an incident – huge pressure!  I think I said it before, but you have to respect the work of the fire and rescue service where these individuals are putting their lives on the line to save others.

School starts back tomorrow.  I think I have sorted clothes out for BB.  Just need to put his name on his new backpack.  I fear it will be a struggle getting back into the routine of school – especially enforcing early nights for BB.

Blipfamine again today – but I sneaked this at the training centre.  Not a great shot – but a couple of useful messages - and you can spot the rail tracks and railway platform.  Behind the bill boards is the carbonaceous training unit where we were told they can simulate real fires at extreme temperatures.