I would say that those who don't use metric, like most Americans, they need to hear the words of the English units to get the warm and fuzzies. They don't care about errors or performance.
I just wonder how the Australians handled the ignorance and also what happens in reverse when Australian fire fighters come to the US and don't understand FFU. Jerry ________________________________ From: John Frewen-Lord <[email protected]> To: U.S. Metric Association <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 9:46:05 AM Subject: [USMA:44123] Re: Firefighter return to S. Oregon after battling Australian wildfires Why try to convert when actually 'on the job'? What does converting achieve, when you're communicating only with others who are also talking metric? All this does is (a) slow down your understanding of the metric system (or anything new, for that matter), (b) increase the probability of errors, which, in this particular snenario, could have serious consequences, and (c) slow down your overall performance, again not what is wanted in a fast moving situation like the wildfires. I wonder if the Australian authorities gave out any training to those from the US on metric units, and using the UTM? ----- Original Message ----- From: John M. Steele To: U.S. Metric Association Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 12:44 PM Subject: [USMA:44121] Firefighter return to S. Oregon after battling Australian wildfires A brief news article: http://kdrv.com/news/local/101516 Brief quote: "The biggest challenge Mitchell says he faced was adapting to the metric system and doing quick conversions." I guess he was not trained in (or does not use) the US National Grid. For those not familiar with the USNG, it is a modification of Universal Transverse Mercator mapping.. 100 km squares are designated with letters (and over very large area with UTM zone and latitude band) so that coordinates within a square are <100000 m. The tiling of lettered 100 km squares is similar to the MGRS used by the US military and NATO allies. There has been an initiative (obviously not very successful) to train first responders in USNG and use it as the ONLY location coordinates in emergencies. The main reason is to avoid numerous local coordinate systems that will not be understood by emergency responders brought in from other areas. Had he been trained and used USNG adapting to Australian mapping would have been trivial. Perhaps it should be a training requirement for firefighters certified to work outside their local area. NOTE: You can't cover a round earth with squares, so adjustments are required. UTM zones are 6° of longitude wide, and incomplete squares exist along the zone edges.
