BY LUKE STEELE
You’re amazed at the properties of some of your customers, with their multistory homes hidden behind long, beautifully manicured, tree-lined driveways. After two days of freezing rain, however, this idyllic view has become a mass of horizontal broken trees and limb debris. Our amazement is now totally forgotten at the end of the drive. This man’s house is on fire, and his family is frantically calling 911 from a cell phone on the third floor.
If you think that the above is not something you would ever see, think again. Numerous real and imagined scenarios in every district share the common characteristics of the above example. If you don’t live in Florida, Mississippi, Texas, or Louisiana, you may even convince yourself that the massive access problems rescue teams faced during the 2005 hurricanes don’t really apply in your district (photo 1). But don’t bet on it. Your response district may not ever get 20 feet of flooding or an earthquake, but natural and man-made disasters can make the least likely scenarios become the focus of the day.
 (1) Photo by James Vreeland, South Carolina Task Force 1; All other photos by author. |
It’s true that the scope of some incidents can overwhelm any system, no matter how well prepared and equipped; but, we’ve all seen incidents we know in our hearts could have been handled better than they were-something happened to prevent the response organization from keeping the incident back from the edge of the cliff.
Sometimes, you just don’t have enough people, equipment, or time to get a handle on the problem. Other times, Mother Nature or some diabolical force tosses you a massive curveball you’re unprepared to handle. Our goal should be to do everything we can to anticipate that breaking ball and send it home. If you keep an open mind, you can do many things to prevent a long walk to the dugout.
EQUIPMENT
Since 9/11, much emphasis has been put on equipment-everyone wants the latest and greatest, most technologically advanced tools not only to fight the new demons but to address our old foes as well. That’s all well and good, but we often forget that everything has its cost. In this case, the price is not just in dollars and cents. We may pay for it in added weight, reduced mobility, and dependence on technology to the extent that we forget how to operate without it.
In their never-ending quest to provide the ultimate in service by having the best equipment, many departments have acquired specialized tools that allow them to solve specific problems quickly and professionally. As firefighters and rescuers, we have this tool for this type of door and that tool for that type-and heaven help the rookie who doesn’t know the difference. Along the way, some departments have gotten heavy and bought bigger and bigger apparatus to carry the arsenal of weapons “needed” to conquer any challenge. However, sooner or later a situation will arise where you can’t put the Big Red Truck next to the problem. When that happens, the problem that arises may seriously impact your ability to do your job, and your success or failure will be determined by how adequately you prepared for that day.
For example, you may have hydraulic tools that can lift a tractor, but the hydraulic pump is often part of the apparatus and is powered from its generator, and the tool radius is limited to your best guess at how much line you can put on the reel and still have the tool work efficiently. There’s a portable pump on the apparatus, a nice compact 50-60 pound unit that will run the tools but needs two people to carry it. You can do the same extrication you can do here half a mile from the nearest road, but you’ve got to carry spreaders, rams, cutters, hose, pump, and hand tools in. Or, you could be forward-thinking enough to have invested in lightweight hydraulic or battery-powered rescue tools (photo 2).
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ACCESS
Environment, access, and conditions can greatly affect the difficulty of a technical rescue. A worker hanging from scaffolding 10 feet off the ground and a base jumper hanging on a guy wire 200 feet up are both technical rescues, but the latter requires a different set of skills and a different mindset. A 10-year-old girl with a broken leg on the playground is a routine EMS call. Put that same child in a remote ravine, and a whole new set of concerns and potential pitfalls become painfully apparent. Your team’s mobility and expertise will be major factors, especially when the location of the incident necessitates that you think further ahead than you are used to doing.
Although a helicopter might be effective in the above example, if you make that your Plan A (and B and C), you can bet that it will be at some other neighborhood the day you need it. Helicopters are uniquely wonderful rescue devices, but there are situations in which they can’t fly and times they are not available.
Maybe you have a theoretically solid Plan B. Grab some burly firefighters, a couple of rigging packs, a stokes basket, and medical kits, and hit the trail. Perhaps your rigging pack is a good example of overkill with 40 pounds of steel carabiners, descent devices, and a couple extra of everything your hasty equipment review suggested might be needed.
Your litter might be the standard stainless-steel, one-piece-the best (and heaviest) that money can buy. Your med kit may be a massive, heavy plastic box with enough drugs and devices to stabilize a football team. The litter in photo 3 weighs more than 80 pounds with no medical kit or rigging.
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Last but absolutely not least, your people could be in turnouts. Better hope they are in leather boots instead of rubber-it’s a long walk. At the end of the incident, you may have more victims than when you started.
If remote rescue is the norm in your district, through evolution and experience, your team probably has learned what equipment it will need and will pack just that and nothing more. You know what clothes to wear and what you will need in the way of food, water, and supplies. The team won’t get caught in a cold rain without protection, and members’ physical conditioning will be up to the rigors of the task at hand.
These team members, and those more technical urban departments, are encouraged to learn how to use what they have in unconventional ways to extend the team’s capabilities. They won’t carry in a 10-foot confined space tripod if someone is down a hole, but you will see the rope and chain saw that will be used to make a perfectly acceptable substitute once they’re on the scene. If they come up a pulley or two short, they’ll know how to rig a mechanical advantage system using rope, in conjunction with natural features, if needed. They have survival and teamwork skills, and the assumption is that not only will they make short work of the crisis at hand, but they also will make it look routine.
The rest of us constantly live with the risk of suddenly being thrust into this dangerous and unfamiliar environment. To be successful, we need to start with (and expand) the same things we use in our normal world when trying to predict situations that will require a specialized response. You may also want to consider the following.
PREPLANNING
Preparing for a wilderness-type rescue in an urban or suburban environment often requires a vivid imagination, because you have to look at the features of the terrain around you as potential enemies. That dip on the interstate may flood, a vital bridge may be down, and every tree is a potential roadblock. High spots may become islands, and ditches may morph into canals. Low bridges become dams. Look at each scenario with a critical eye, and judge whether you can defeat the obstacle or will have to work around it.
Don’t put too much faith in a chain saw. A good cutter with a couple of competent people pulling can clear a truck-sized hole through an average tree in five to 10 minutes, but if you have 50 trees, you have a major access problem. Cutting loaded timber safely requires a lot more than a casual acquaintance with the tool, and every additional saw exponentially increases the chance of an accident if personnel are working close together, so there is a practical limit to how many people you can put on a clearing job.
Some obstacles may require a dual approach: sending a team around the obstacle while another works at removing it. Your analysis, both in the preplan and the attack, should constantly monitor for tunnel vision. Extend the old “try before you pry” axiom to avoid wasting precious time removing an obstacle when an alternate route is clear.
While planning this theoretical response, keep in mind that your department’s ability to manage people and make things happen will be key to your success. Your people should be intimately acquainted with the National Incident Management System (NIMS) by now, but if they are not or don’t use it unless they are training or forced to, you can expect all of the mistakes that will predictably happen and the breakdown of command when people start working around NIMS instead of through it.
COMMUNICATIONS
The saying “I’ve been poor, and I’ve had money, and having money is better” is also true for emergency communications, which often are critical to successful incident mitigation. As we learned on 9/11 and have relearned in every major incident since then, dependable public service communication in the aftermath of a disaster (and sometimes on routine calls) can be a myth. This is not the place for an examination of the reported shortcomings of trunked UHF communication, but the reality is that the towers go offline when infrastructure gets hammered. To make matters worse, the short wavelength of the “frequency band du jour” does not penetrate obstacles or radiate long distances-translated, that means you can often measure in feet the distance over which two ridiculously expensive handheld radios will permit you to talk to each other directly.
So think about backup plans and alternatives. Satellite phones are now the rage, and as long as somebody else is buying them and paying the monthly charges, fine. Are you going to buy one for every attack team? If not, you need a means to get a message from the guys actually doing the work and needing the help to the guy holding the magic wand (and pray he still remembers how “this here thing” works).
Truck-mounted repeaters can at least ensure that your team members can stay in touch with each other and an emergency command post. If your department still owns some of the VHF spectrum, think about picking up some (now ridiculously cheap) mobile and handheld radios and testing that concept. For some teams, amateur (ham) radio is an alternative. Individuals can get licenses easily, the radios are cheap and incredibly rugged, and you can put together a back-packable, 20-mile repeater or almost any other custom solution for your communication problems. A competent operator using one of the lower-frequency (HF) radios can, with a little antenna improvisation, talk to anywhere in the world. No, it’s not as sexy as the Internet or a satellite phone, but it works. With a little effort and using the skills of the right people, you just might be amazed at how well it works.
It is important to note that there are numerous amateur radio repeaters scattered throughout the country. It would be a mistake to assume that you can just take them over in an emergency. For one thing, they may be on the same tower as your 800-MHz equipment and suffer the same fate; but, more importantly, the groups that paid to put them up also have emergency teams depending on those repeaters. If you decide to look at amateur radio, enlist knowledgeable people in the industry and service to help you design a versatile solution.
The one thing you cannot do with communication is assume that it will work just because you spent a great deal of money on it. It won’t, and screaming at the sales rep on Day 2 will not fix it.
SPECIALIZED EQUIPMENT
Circumstances become vastly different when the apparatus is half a mile away instead of 30 feet from the scene. The need for grabbing the right equipment becomes a lot more critical when any extra equipment you need is 40 minutes instead of 40 seconds away. The next time your team practices rope rescue at the training center, count the number of trips to the truck it takes to get additional rigging plates, carabiners, and webbing. Now think about vastly increasing the distance to the truck. After the initial equipment selection, have someone drive the truck several hundred yards away and park it. Odds are you’ll have some tired firefighters when the evolution is done.
You can argue that no one could remember everything, but you’d be wrong. Mountain rescue teams and progressive suburban and urban rescue teams do it all the time, because for them “the truck” could be four to five hours away. You can do it, too, by taking careful notes on what your team comes back to get. Was it necessary? Was there something they already had that could have been used for the same purpose? Could a piece of hardware previously carried to the roof be replaced with one more versatile?
If your disaster plan requires rope rescue after a hike, take a long hard look at the equipment in your packs. Think about shedding as much steel as you can. There are now National Fire Protection Association (NFPA)-compliant aluminum carabiners-this one substitution can save several pounds. Other hardware can be replaced with lightweight alternatives that work just as well but won’t break your back. It may not be NFPA-compliant and it will take more scrutiny to remain safe for use, but the victims will be much happier because the folks who reach them won’t be wiped out from carrying twice as much weight as they had to (many people believe that there should be an amended NFPA standard for wilderness and off-road rescue operations). Along the same lines, look at lightweight and two-piece litters, alternative stabilization devices engineered for backpacking, and smaller (and lighter) pulleys and mechanical advantage (MA) systems. The litter in photo 4 offers similar functionality to that of photo 3 but has a big advantage in portability. There are some new devices on the market that work well, such as a lowering or rappelling device that can also be pressed into service as part of a Z-drag MA system, replacing a pulley, friction device, and ascender with a single item. Devices like this give you more firepower with less weight and bulk.
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You will also need team equipment packs-packs, not boxes. Have at least one full medical pack, worn by someone who knows how to use it and packed by someone who knows the difference between necessary and nice. Another pack should carry spare batteries, lights, signal devices, water-makers, and other items that will quickly become scarce should Plan A fail and you’re out a lot longer than anticipated. Again, when you train, every time someone goes to the truck, you should find out why and work toward making those extra trips unnecessary.
Apply this same analysis to your firefighting equipment. Think about hand-jacking a thousand feet of large-diameter hose (LDH) through downed trees like in photo 1. No, a three-inch line won’t provide anywhere near the volume of water the LDH will, but you can sure get it in there faster, and it might make the difference in being able to get someone out. Reduce it to 1 3/4 -inch for the attack line and kick the pressure at the engine through the roof, and you can fight fire. In addition, not having to pump a whole truckload of water just to flood the supply line could be real handy if the water system is compromised. Organize groups of tools so that trips back to the apparatus are minimized, and make sure that people know what they are supposed to carry to ensure that the team arrives at the fight with all the tools it needs. If you have multistory buildings, you probably already have high-rise packs-it’s the same concept.
Most importantly, think about personal protective equipment (PPE). The turnout gear is for what we do on a normal basis, and it works well. However, it is nearly useless for most of the work you will do in this “wilderness” environment. Look at the PPE issued to rescue teams such as the Los Angeles County (CA) Fire Department’s Rescue Task Force. It includes things like emergency shelters and GPS devices. Your people will need the same type of gear these seasoned teams use, including footwear.
In this type of response, PPE covers personal comfort/survival items as well. Everyone who walks away from the staging area should have at minimum water, food, rain gear, signaling devices, bug repellent, and minor first-aid items. You can keep this equipment stored in load-bearing vests or fanny packs, but make sure to leave the back open for the rest of the load. The vests can be dropped and turnouts donned if you have a fire, but you’ll be prepared for a wider range of problems.
If you can afford it, look at some of the new equipment that’s aimed directly at this type of problem. Small, all-wheel-drive vehicles, super-light hydraulic extrication tools, and other tools designed for lightweight and nimble rescue might mean the difference between winning and losing on the fireground.
LOAD-OUTS
You’re training for this response you hope you never have to perform, and everyone is standing around loaded down and waiting for the command to move out. What’s the weight distribution? Does one guy have 80 pounds on his back while another is lounging with 20? Can you split the loads so that one member is not dropping out after a half hour? Are you carrying unnecessary gear? Examine the load-outs for items that are unnecessary or redundant and get rid of them. Do you really need three rigging packs? Can several gallons of water be replaced with a filtering pump?
TRAINING
Just as in firefighting, the success of your efforts will be determined by the depth, consistency, and thoroughness of your training. The team that succeeds is the one that embraces the brotherhood concept and functions together seamlessly. Members should be picked for their expertise in at least one area and abilities in the other areas of skills the team requires. Everyone should be trained in navigation, survival, and emergency skills. Your district may have unique hazards that require specialists such as someone experienced in handling snakes or large predatory animals. Familiarity with tools like GPS and mission-specific communication equipment is needed regularly, to avoid loss of skills. Look at the way the military has designed light infantry or other remote insertion teams, and use cross-training to expand the capabilities of your people.
Teach them how to think unconventionally: how to build tripods, bipods, gin poles, and simple machines like levers and inclined planes using nothing but the materials at hand. Get someone in to show them how to move ridiculously heavy objects by using their brains, a minimum of equipment, and natural features. One of the most fascinating discussions I have ever had was while eating lunch at a rigging class. A Korean War veteran spent the hour explaining how the soldiers used gin poles made from whole trees to pull tanks out of the mud during that conflict.
The principles and techniques employed were the genesis for a lot of the heavy rescue techniques in the early days, until most of us decided we’d rather pay somebody else to figure out the puzzle. In doing that, we forgot that our problem doesn’t always match the one somebody else solved. Your team’s ability to improvise, adapt, and overcome will have a direct impact on the time it takes to solve problems when you don’t have the world at your fingertips.
In addition to very specialized training for the people handling the most technical incidents, you need to address the whole training issue and determine how much all of your people need to know. You should gear some evolutions toward limited access: A line of cones 500 feet from the training building can turn a simple evolution into a mess, complicating everything from command to logistics. People will complain loudly, but the first time a fallen tree stops them at the road, they will be talking about how farsighted the training staff is.
FITNESS
Go on and roll your eyes at this simple statement, but the people chosen for these types of response have to be physically up to the task. This is not a plum assignment. If this team gets put into the field, it needs to have the physical ability to complete the mission. The reality is that we are going to take care of our own, so if you send five people on a five-mile hike and one gets chest pains two miles in, the original mission is not going to be the priority. Your only option at that point is to organize and dispatch another team. This can be extremely demanding and strenuous work, and the people who do it need to routinely work on conditioning and strength training. There will be times when all the mechanical advantage you have must be supplemented with all of the muscle you brought with you. You may hike in several miles and perform a difficult and tiring rescue. All you have to do now is hike back three miles-oh yeah, now you’ve got a victim to carry with you. If you have people who aren’t willing to invest the effort to get their physical conditioning in line, don’t put them in a situation where they might compromise a mission or risk a life-threatening collapse.
Sound like an insurmountable task? It sure can be, and it’s the rare department that can think of all the potential problems and pitfalls. Most departments don’t have the time to train on all the specialties we now cover, much less add skills we hope we never have to use. However, look at how much you can do-all the planning, research, and logistics. Think about preparing a core group of motivated (and motivating) people who can lead teams in such a mission and generate the kind of pride that encourages people to reach outside of their comfort level. Odds are you already have a group of fit and capable firefighters and they already have put together things like high-rise packs to prevent long walks back to the apparatus. All you need to do is extend their capabilities and encourage them to think about options. If you succeed, not only would they be able to handle remote operations with ease, you would have created a more competent and confident firefighter.
A gymnastics judge once told me that the best gymnasts are those who make it look easy. That statement is profoundly true for our profession as well. The safest, fastest, and most professional rescues your team will perform will come off so smoothly that they will be almost boring to the untrained eye. They won’t be newsworthy, because no firefighters will be laying their lives on the line in a heroic effort to cheat fate. There won’t be glorious editorials praising God, country, and (insert your name here); nor will there be the snide “lucky idiot” mutterings from neighboring departments or perhaps your own teammates. What there will be is quiet respect and maybe even a little envy for a job well done by the people who matter. If it happens, it will be because your team was clairvoyant enough to see the future and dedicated enough to put a plan in place to deal with it using teamwork, desire, and unstoppable commitment. Everyone goes home, including a victim (or victims) some people would have written off as a lost cause. When you’re sitting around pondering what it all means, that would be something to be proud of.
LUKE STEELE, a volunteer firefighter since 1983, is a certified firefighter II, an EMT, a rescue technician, and a North Carolina-certified instructor for firefighter I/II and rescue technician.
