The training i mentioned in my last post was done on the 16 Jan 2010.  Instead of a few colleagues, it turned out to be more than 10 of them.  One of our subsidiary company staffs also joins in.  It is not the numbers that worried me, but it is the fact that some of them are experienced engineers.  I delivered the classroom part as per my earlier planning, but had to skip most of the slides considering the time limitation.
The practical part i asked one of my colleague to handle and it all went on well.

Most of the trainees had a chance to operate the fire extinguisher and tried to extinguish a small fire.
This photo shows a trainee trying to kill the fire.

Alow me to comment a bit on this photo.

First, look at his foot steps, he was standing with right foot forward, and he is holding the discharge nozzle with his right hand.  Usually, this is not the best way to approch a fire because it is harder to balance the weight of the extinguisher cylinder.  It also appears to me that he is not fully confident, therefore he reserve his left leg at the back, prepared to make a rereat in case of uncontrolled situation.

Now, look at how he hold the discharge hose.  He is holding it at the nozzle tip like holding a pencil.  This method usually results in a sharper angle of discharge on the fire base, as you can see, the angle is about 45 degree.  In this case, because the fuel is liquid, the powder discharge may splash the liquid fuel out of the tray and ended up on the grass, and the grass will start burning, and he will have to deal with more spots of fire.  And, that was exactly what happened, but i did not record it in photo.

So, what is the problem with aiming at that angle?
No, there is nothing wrong, as long as the fire is extinguished, peacefully and quickly.
In a small fire like this one, we cannot really see the difference because there is practically a lot more powder than required to kill the fire, but if the fire gets bigger and bigger, we will need to put every gram of powder into action, to extinguisher the fire, ..... otherwise, the fire will extinguish us.

In my next post, i will try to elaborate what it means and how to put the extinguishing agent to action.