It is pleasing to have won the “Judges Impact Award” at industry giant Learning Pool’s annual conference on 14 Oct 2021. The award recognises digital learning material I created on the danger devices powered by lithium-ion batteries pose to emergency services. I created the project whilst on secondment with the National Fire Chief Council (NFCC) . The module was further nominated as a finalist at the 2023 Learning Live Awards, in the ‘People Development Programme of the year – public sector‘ category. Really pleased to see my work given the nod by an industry leading firm, and the Learning Performance institute (LPI).

Here’s the story:

The rise of lithium-ion batteries is synonymous with the increase and evolution of our technologically advanced societies. We put batteries in everything from phones, watches and laptops, to cars, lawnmowers and even planes. For the most part, these batteries are reliable and provide dense energy to power our world. However, when they go wrong, they go wrong in an extremely serious and dramatic way. As Learning Experience Designer on a project for the NFCC, I worked with a renowned and respected electrochemistry professor and Fire Service experts to provide frontline staff with knowledge and techniques to keep them safe and help with deal with the threat posed by these volatile batteries. I created a learning experience that drew on real world case studies, explained how the battery technology worked, and showed the and the affects, dangers and consequences of it going wrong on fire behaviour, toxic gases and vapour cloud explosion. 

After being published in April 2021, the material was offered up to the UK Fire and Rescue sector via UKFRS.com and FRSLearn.com and Services up and down the country made use of it. One of these Services was Humberside in the Northeast England.

During the summer, Humberside crews were called to a crashed Tesla on fire. The car had been in self-drive mode and hit a tree. Staff shortages meant that the initial crew arrived without an Incident Commander. Seeing both the fire and the need to rescue the driver, they called their Control Room to request that an Incident Commander be mobilised. The chap who got the call was at his local station going through the module on lithium-ion batteries, he was particularly taken with the chemical gases released at a lithium-ion battery fire. When he arrived on scene, he immediately noticed that the inside of the car was filling with a toxic vapour cloud made up of various deadly chemicals (deadly stuff like Hydrogen cyanide (HCN), Carbon monoxide (CO) and Hydrofluoric acid gas (HF) etc. ), and that the gases building up were not just smoke or steam as the attending crew had assumed.

He broke protocol and whipped the driver out of the car and promptly had him sent off to hospital, where the attending doctors reported that the driver was moments away from death by the poisonous gas mix.

The Incident Commander fedback to the NFCC learning materials team that if it hadn’t been for the material I’d created he wouldn’t have recognised the threat. He credited the learning material with equipping him to make the lifesaving intervention.

That was really nice feedback to receive; being awarded for it too is special.

It’s also worth mentioning that a separate module I put together on Explosives was also shortlisted at the awards in the “Most innovative use of Learning Technologies” category, beating our competition from across the globe.