Riot police in the crossfire
Teil 3 - Fitness-for-use testing at GORE-TEX Professional. Blog by Andreas Marmsoler
"Safety first during the fitness-for-use tests!"
Riot police and closed police units can experience very different deployment scenarios. The majority of operations are peaceful, accompanying law enforcement missions. Increasingly, however, there are also operations in which the law enforcement officers are confronted with massive violence and are also directly attacked. Particularly shocking escalations, such as those that occurred in 2017 at the G20 summit in Hamburg, are just one example of the increased threats during operations. Molotov cocktails that have been seized testify to the fact that the danger of arson attacks directly on officers is real.
There are no defined test procedures for throwing a Molotov cocktail. In order to test "fitness for use" and the protection of GORE-TEX PYRAD® product technology in a simulated emergency, Katja Christof, Product Specialist at GORE-TEX Professional for police clothing, had this situation recreated. Under controlled conditions and with high safety requirements, a Molotov "attack" was simulated.
The instruction to the stuntman was the same as the police operational training: first, grasp the situation, second, find an escape route and actively move away from the fire, and third, extinguish any liquid that may be burning on the surface of the clothing by rolling on the floor or tapping it out. Jan Singh simulated throwing a Molotov cocktail - a gasoline/diesel mixture in a bottle onto the ground in front of the stuntman.