A firefighting technique currently used in Europe could prevent tragedies like the one that claimed two Winnipeg fire captains this month, experts say.

Tom Nichols and Harold Lessard died when they were trapped on the second floor of a burning Winnipeg home and then hit by a flashover, a huge fireball that reached thousands of degrees Celsius in seconds. 

But their deaths were needless, proponents of a firefighting technique known as 3D say.

The system — which focuses on how the fire will develop and how actions of firefighters will affect it — is widely used in Sweden and Britain. However, it flies in the face of traditional techniques used in North America.

Ed Hartin, a battalion chief at the Gresham Fire Service in Oregon who started teaching the technique five years ago, uses an analogy to explain the difference: "Many firefighters, they use their [water] hose line kind of like a chainsaw, and we're encouraging them to use it like surgeon's scalpel."

'Never lost another firefighter'

The traditional method of blasting fires with huge volumes of water can make matters worse, Hartin says, so he teaches his firefighters to use short bursts of mist to cool a fire before it develops a flashover. 

Controlling ventilation is also key factor, he says — breaking a window or opening a door can initiate a flashover. 

Hartin cites a dozen cases in the United States where actions taken unwittingly by firefighters made fires spread more quickly. That doesn't happen in most fire services in the United Kingdom, which adopted the 3D system a decade ago, he said.

"Where we use this training, we've never lost another firefighter again," agreed Paul Grimwood, a retired London fire captain who has trained thousands of firefighters in the 3D system.

"Sometimes firefighters die on the job and there's nothing that could have been done about it.  But … more than 90 per cent of the time you can point to key control measures that weren't taken, and certainly we've found that with flashover-related events, it's almost always a training issue."

Grimwood said he has done some 3D training in Canada. Last week, on the heels of the Winnipeg deaths, he received two requests from fire services here who want to learn more about the technique.