‘When every second counts’ is the slogan of our national emergency phone number 112.
And I have seen it a couple of times yesterday, looking at banners when I visited the last day of the IVIC show in Rosmalen.
The IVIC is a show where police, fire brigade and other public services give demonstrations and let the public see what kind of equipment they have and what they are capable of.
And as you can see on the picture above, a standard fire brigade vehicle is also equipped to open doors and enter buildings quickly. But since there is no time to be subtle and because ‘every second counts’ these tools are pretty straight forward.
And there was a lot more to see. There were many demonstrations, and I was most impressed by a set of hydraulic cutters and spreaders. Our fire brigades use these in case of severe car crashes. They will simply cut a car to shreds to free people that are caught inside a car wreck.
What really caught my eye was a robot that is used to examine (and if necessary detonate) explosives. This remote controlled robot is the eyes of the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal).
Pretty cool stuff …I hope it’s obvious I had a good time ….
I saw one of those robots recently at a show here at MIT… the technician that ran it said he preferred to defuse bombs by hand (wearing a bomb-suit) — not because it’s safer, but because he knew the suit better than he did the robot. It was a very impressive robot, though: it had the capability to trigger something like eight shocktubes at once (for controlled detonation), in addition to an armored video camera and the obligatory water gun.
Apparently the US Army has a whole warehouse full of the things in Iraq, and whenever one comes back damaged from the field it gets stripped and fitted with replacement parts of whatever is damaged. Really tough beasts, those things.
Nothing new appear here. For a while it was lot of news here, but now is nothing happening. Not fun to update your site to find same old articles… What’s happening?