“Everything went according to plan”
4 lanes with a door at the end. The danger lurking behind the door is unknown, the member of the emergency response team needs to instantly react to what he or she sees. FireWare realised an innovative concept at Medi-Select in Haarlem. 4 scenarios which are running at the same time, alongside each other. Will you end up in a photocopying room? Has a container or a boiler caught fire? Or are you walking amongst the sparks in a server cabinet where things have gone wrong?
“It was like the idea of the 4 different lanes was created during the dead of night”, Medi-Select’s cofounder Peppino Roest tells us. “You will see that people don’t like waiting when you read the evaluation forms. If twelve of you are standing around a corridor and three are working on a scenario, then the rest is doing nothing.”
4 training lanes means all students can get to work at the same time. All three in a group have their own task: approaching, offering help and the last one is backup, pressing the alarm button and handing over the extinguisher. Tasks are changed every round and everyone is competent after twenty minutes.
“How is something on fire, where is the smoke coming from and where is the core? This is the kind of experience FireWare has managed to introduce”, according to Roest. Everything was signed and realised in August and the training centre was in daily use in September. “Everything has gone according to plan”. The ideas about simulated fire was one of the main reasons Roest decided to work with FireWare: “It’s fake, it’s Hollywood.”
He has received many positive reactions about the new area. “The customer can see we have invested. Students can identify new things and that’s how you maintain customers.”
