Relax - everything is under control ...

My colleague in Tehran has been helping some of our other colleagues with their course. I took the opportunity to see what they were up to in the fire boxes. Unlike the one's George and I use, there is no pretence of making them look like a room The object of the exercise is to show fire fighters how to control the heated gases which develop rapidly at ceiling level. It is also an opportunity to show them things like the "neutral"plane which is the lowest level to which superheated gas and smoke will settle inside a compartment. George, having lit the fires in preparation for the student exercise, was in playful mood as I tried to photograph the fire development. Note the absence of George in the second picture as the fire spreads across the ceiling in the smoke plume and the neutral plane begins to form - thats the thin layer of white-ish smoke you can see around half the height of the unit from the floor.

Fire training

We are hard at it on our third round of students for fire investigation. I took a number of pictures during our burns for their practical investigation exercises. I've been doing this for a little over ten years now - and it still surprises me. The fire has both a beauty and a darkness, it is one of our most useful and yet most destructive forces. I hope this picture make you think about your own safety from this threat.

Citadel

Mausi was lucky enought during her stay in Ankara that her work load still left a little bit of time for sightseeing. A touristic must certainly is the Citadel on one of the hills that are dispersed throughout Ankara.


Apparently the foundations were laid by the Romans and the Byzantines built onto them. Today it looks like a very small, fortified village, very much in the Western European tradition of the Middle Ages.


This was supposed to be place where court was held in Roman times. The defendant was stood in the pit with the court sat in the gallery above him. If he was found guilty the lions were let into the pit...


Anyways, the citadel is well worth a visit. The view from up there is splendid and it is good fun walking along on the top of the walls...

Civil Service parasites

My blood boiled today. I received a copy of a UK newspaper a day or so old. Yes, you've probably guessed. It was the headline coupled with the date that had me speechless with fury. The Civil Servants in the Ministry of Defence have been paid out £47 million pounds in bonuses for "efficiency"..........

OK, now I'm having to carefully control my heart rate, my blood pressure and take some serious anger management exercise. This bunch of insufferable incompetents have been awarded BONUSES? For EFFICIENCY? Do they seriously think the rest of us are blind, half-witted idiots? We have our soldiers and sailors on such low wages that they need to draw "Income Allowance" benefits from the Department of Social Security to keep their families in the basics. And the Mandarins in their comfy offices (Refurbished at the cost of a new Type 45 Destroyer!) award themselves bonuses that would have seen all our fighting services given a decent pay rise!

This same bunch of utter incompetents can't manage any contract on budget and on time - in fact the doubling of the cost of replacing the Trident system is entirely the fault of these incompetents, and the spiralling cost of the new aircraft carriers is down to the same bunch of morons. And they give themselves £47 million in bonuses for EFFICIENCY?

Its not just a disgrace. Its a full blown scandal and its time that other bunch of parasites in the Palace of Westminster stamped on them and cut the Civil Service down to size. Its long past time for the Civil Service to be slashed and reduced to a fraction of its size. But it won't happen anytime soon - the Westminster W*nk*rs are so deeply embroiled in this disgraceful theft of the Taxpayers money they can't afford to do anything about it.

OK, OK, I'm going to go and lie down for a bit.

Friday musings

It seems that there is the potential for a number of other jobs here in Tehran/Iran for the team currently engaged in training. Some of it will be quite intense if it is awarded to us and will involve a great deal of survey work for fire safety. While it is encouraging it is also a daunting prospect as there is more than just abricks and mortar/legislation thing to be achieved here. There is a whole cultural sea-change required.

For one thing this country has an unusual electrical supply system. Most countries use Three Phase Thre or Four Wire systems. That is, they have two "live" wires and one or two "neutral" wires with an "earth". The system here is Three Phase, Three wire - with all three wires being "live" and the "earth" acting as the "neutral". In essence this means many of the safety devices we use in Europe or the US simply don't work on this system. And then there is the approach to actually installing and installation or extending it. Spaghetti is the term that springs most readily to mind.

Stoarge practice, working practice even displays will all have to be addressed in the places it is proposed we advise on. And those are not simply a case of "show and tell" - this is going to be a battle for hearts and minds and to convince people that it is not the "Will of G-d" that fires happen or people die in them. They have done business this way for centuries, why change now? Just because some westerners tell you to? Not likely.

Coupled with that I'm not at all sure I really want to spend months at a time here dealing with this.

I think, as Fagan famously says, "I t'ink I better t'ink it out again!"

Remembrance

Remembrance Day always brings out a sense of loss and of thankfulness for the sacrifice made on our behalf by so many in so many wars. It seems the human psyche is just incapable of learning from it all, we constantly find new excuses to be at each other's throats or at least our politicians do.

Peace is a relative thing, and it depends on being prepared to stand up for what you believe in and for what you believe to be right. Wras erupt when people are persuaded by their leaders, by media bias and by propaganda, that they are threatened by some other group. Sadly, nothing has changed in the thousands of years of human "civilisation" to change that.

As I recalled the sacrifice of so many lives yesterday, I also said a prayer for those who survived. They too were marked by their experiences and we should remember that.

Five to go ...

Only another five weeks and I'll be sat on the flight home for a short break. I must say, pleasant as the people are here, I miss having my own things around me and being able to set my own task ist daily.

And I miss Madam Paddy Cat.