The Promise of the World Fire Congress

lines.Is there a place, uh, if people are interested in, um, reading those proceedings or learning more about how to participate in this, is there a website or a place that they should go?

Yeah, and, and so that website is www.worldfirecongress.org.

I will put a link to the, uh, to this as well in the pod description notes, uh, when this publishes, so people can just click on that and go right to it.

Yeah, but perhaps in addition, uh, to what Otto said, you know, it's about the content, it's about our challenges, it's about sharing, inspiring, improving.

Um, but on the other hand, um, it's-- we have in Europe a saying, my own language a saying, we call it kop voor kennen.

Uh, if you translate it, it, it means know the heads, you know, know the people who are on a global level, um, meeting them, exchanging phone numbers, uh, having seen each other, you know, having a conversation.

And what we see is that in between those two years, if you have a problem, "Oh, I know him.

I, I give him a call," uh, or we organize it online.

So, um, and if, if you met each other somewhere or had a small conversation or even drink a beer in the evening, you know, um, that, that, that's a great benefit, you know, um, building your network on a global level.

Um, and that's one of the, you know, uh, side things that happen als- as well at, uh, at the World Fire Congress.

So it's not only about the content, it's also building a network.

And, and, and Stephan's exactly right.

And, and one example of one of the discussions that we're having globally now is on civil defense.

So civil defense, uh, during-- at post-Cold War, what was really big within the United States before post-Cold War, of course, uh, and, and so that had kind of fallen off.

But now what you're seeing, uh, in the, the Pacific, uh, Asian region, uh, with, uh, some of the tensions there, what we're witnessing, uh, in the Middle East, uh, what we're wi- witnessing in Europe, uh, with, uh, the war in Ukraine, is a lot of the focus is really on civil defense.

Uh, how do you prepare your communities, uh, not for that disaster, which in the United States we used to say, oh, seventy-two hours, um, to be self-sustained.

Now, in some parts of the country, their, their planning horizon is to be self-sustained for thirty days.

A- and so we're starting to see, okay, what are the ramifications of civil defense, and how is that integrating, uh, within the fire service and becoming one of our greatest challenges that we're discussing globally?

Yeah.

You know, it, it, it surprised me, but one of the things, uh, as Otto mentioned about civil defense or civil protection, um, I, I noticed on a global level we had different, uh, disc- uh, different definitions for that.

Uh, and just talk about what's civil protection and what's the difference between civil defense and civil protection, that was one of the topics.

But as Otto mentioned, if you look at in, in Europe, especially if you go to the eastern part of Europe, uh, the discussion is about being thirty days, one month self-resilient, um, and how do you do it? Uh, and we had some presentations about, you know, the Baltic states, uh, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, how do they prepare themselves? Uh, and in the end, it doesn't matter if there's a geopolitical threat or it's just, uh, a blackout.

Um, in the end, you do the same.

You know, you have to be self-resilient for a long time.

And we share a lot of experience, best practices, knowledge on, on, on this topic as well.