DOVER, OH - After a building catches fire, smoke can be so dense that no human vision can penetrate the haze.
Firefighters entering such smoky rooms have to look for people, hot spots and hazards such as holes in the floor.
Without the ability to see what's in front of them, they may have to feel their way around the perimeter of the room, keeping one hand on the wall to maintain their bearings.
In other situations, they may have to play follow-the-leader, placing a hand on the shoulder of a colleague equipped with a thermal imaging camera that can show what is otherwise invisible.
Dover firefighters should not have to rely on those techniques as much, now that the fire department has obtained hand-held thermal imaging cameras for each of its 24 firefighters. The units cost $690 each, according to Fire Chief Russell Volkert. They came from Seek Thermal of Santa Barbara, Calif.
"A regular camera picks up light waves to make images, where this picks up heat waves to make images," said Dover Fire Department Capt. Brooks Ross. "In a smoke-filled environment, you can't see light, but you can see heat."
The department was previously equipped with three older thermal imaging cameras, one for each fire engine. They are the size of a power drill. The department also has eight or nine thermal cameras that mount on firefighters' masks. But the units have short battery life, Ross said.
Ross and Volkert see the additional thermal imaging devices enhancing the safety of the general public and members of the fire department, as well as providing more visual information for firefighting.
"Instead of just one person being able to have better vision through the smoke, now everyone has that opportunity to be able to be able to see," Ross said.
"Basically, it's like you can see through smoke with this thing," he said. "And it's giving you a visual representation of the room or people in that room, but it's all based on the different temperatures or heat that they're giving off.
"In an actual building that's on fire, the body will actually look a little bit cooler than the surrounding environment. It helps us search a building faster in case there are victims inside.
"It's not only useful for finding possible victims in a fire, it's useful for finding the fire if you can't see where it's at.
"There's all kinds of uses for hazardous materials," Ross said. "You're able to look at tanker vehicles and you can see actually how much liquid is in the tanker because there's going to be different temperatures."
Thermal imaging cameras can also be used to search for missing persons, Volkert said.
The newest thermal cameras show heat profiles in color. Hot things are red. Cool things are blue. Older cameras showed hotter objects in white and cooler ones in black.
As the units have fallen in price, they have become smaller.
Ross remembers soliciting funds from service clubs in New Philadelphia and Dover to buy the first thermal imaging cameras for both cities' fire departments in 1997. He and retired New Philadelphia fire Capt. John Allen Daugherty raised $70,000, enough to buy two cameras for each department. Each was as big as a loaf of bread.
Newer units are about the size of cell phones. Ross also sees them having improved imaging.
"Just like with any technology, the picture you get is a lot better and more defined because it's more heat-sensitive," he said.
"The late '90s, early 2000s was when you first saw fire departments start to utilize these," Ross said. "But, again, price-wise, each camera was worth as much as a car, so it was not something that a lot of departments had.
"What's great about this now is that every one of us has one. Everyone has that vision now."
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