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Imagine the frightening for a moment...your house is on fire. It is full of smoke. You can't see. You have one piece of knowledge that helps you escape this trap alive; you know your home. You know where the doors are; you know where the stairs are. Even though you cannot see due to the blinding smoke in the blaze, you are able to escape alive.

Now imagine this scene for the firefighter that comes to extinguish the blaze. They have the same blinding smoke to walk through that you do. They have one problem. In most cases, they do not know plan of the building they are entering. They may be entering a building that they have never entered before. The suffocating smoke makes them resort to having to crawl on their hands and knees, feeling their way along throughout the building. You are probably thinking that firefighters are used to having to learn the plan of a building blind, but then you have to stop and consider the following. What if someone you know and love is trapped in that building? Now the time that the firefighter spends learning how to navigate the building seems like a waste of time.

There is no greater fear in the mind of a firefighter, than not being able to find a person and save that person's life in a burning building. Thanks to technology, tools that firefighters use have come a long way in helping this situation. One tool, which is on the cutting edge of firefighting technology, is that of a thermal imaging camera.

A thermal imaging camera reads heat in a room. It then displays a black and white image for the firefighter. The black part of the image is something in the room that is fairly cool. The white part of the image is something that is hot. The whiter the image, the hotter the substance. This tool means the difference between night and day for the firefighter. They can enter a building and see where they need to go. They can spot people who need help much more quickly. They can even tell where hotspots in the building are, thus knocking the fire out and putting the blaze out much more quickly.

The camera does not work in the way that you would think of a camera as working. It does not take still pictures of the scene. It is much more like a video camera that the firefighter wears. Everywhere that the firefighter looks, the image is displayed before their eyes of what they are looking at. In "normal" fire conditions, that is not possible as we cannot see through smoke.

At the recent fire in downtown Norwich, a thermal imaging camera would have been very useful. That fire was very stubborn and tough to put out. Firefighters had to return several times because in the rubble that was left, it was next to impossible to tell where the spots that could still be burning were. All they could do was wait for the smoke to come to the surface and then douse the spot with water. A thermal imaging camera is not impaired in the same matter as our eyes. It could look down through the rubble and tell the firefighter where heat existed and where there was no heat. To see some pictures of the intense smoke that firefighters must be able to see through in order to save lives and property, just look at the pictures of some major fires in the Norwich area in the last decade.

Fire Captain Elmer Douglas tries out the Cairns Iris thermal imaging camera in the image at right. By extinguishing the fire quickly there is less damage to the building in terms of heat and water damage. Also, there is less chance of the fire starting again due to a hot spot that cannot be seen. The thermal imaging camera allows the firefighter to see all this to possibly avert a bigger tragedy than has already occurred.

The Save A Life Fund Committee introduced a thermal imaging camera as their next goal for the Tree of Life Campaign. It is expected to take around $40,000.00 to purchase one. Please give generously. The next time that the firefighters are searching a burning building for a person, could be the time that you need their help the most...