firefighting

A Real Tower Rescue

Posted by rescue2training on October 12, 2012
Posted in: firefighting, high angle, rope rescue, technical rescue, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

The raw video is of an actual tower  rescue in Washington DC. No, not a telecom climber stranded high up an antenna, but a worker dangling on his safety line after his motorized scaffolding had a catastrophic failure. It was Tower 3 who positioned themselves to be able to use the bucket to go get the worker and unclip him from his system and eliminate the need for any type of rope rescue (damn).

A couple of points to note in the video:

Even though it appeared the Tower was going to be able to get the victim, the guys were still getting dressed out in order to perform a rope based operation should it have been necessary. It was a good job getting plan B in motion in case plan A didn’t work for whatever reason.

The worker hanging in his harness was staying relatively still while hanging. As noted by Dr. Roger Mortimer in his 2011 ITRS presentation, it is the lack of motion while hanging in a harness that seems to cause Suspension Trauma, Harness Hang Syndrome, whatever you want to call it. The point is to get the people to move their legs if they are at all able to. Here is a link to his published work on the topic:

http://www.itrsonline.org/PapersFolder/2011/Mortimer2011_ITRSPaper.pdf

Last, it looked like the bottom end of his safety line was entangled with the scaffolding and pulling tension on the line across his body. I don’t know if that means anything or not, but it should be a consideration during size up.  If the Tower was unable to get to the worker, it’s possible they could get to that safety line and free it up if it were causing issues.

[brightcove vid=1878559651001&exp3=1685956553001&surl=http://c.brightcove.com/services&pubid=29906171001&pk=AQ~~,AAAABvaL9Hk~,mLC66bU8hPOBGO8BPO1coBAeF5n-gkxo&w=300&h=225]

Anchors are the Key

Posted by rescue2training on October 6, 2012
Posted in: firefighting, high angle, rope rescue, technical rescue, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

It’s obvious that anchors are the key to any successful rope rescue operation, but sometimes they just aren’t where we need them or they aren’t as strong as we’d like.  Take a look at the three anchor failure videos below for proof. While there are some slackliners who have an idea of the forces they are putting on their anchors, a lot have no clue. Evidence:

Maritime anchor failure:

If, however, you are interested in a strong portable anchor for your rope or vehicle extrication team, then take a look at the pictures below. James Hurley of Heavy Rescue Solutions has developed an aluminum anchor plate that can be picketed into the ground with three picket. Wrap the handle with webbing and pull away. The plate is roughly 3 feet long and weighs around 25 lbs without the pickets. The pickets can be driven by hand or with an air impact chisel which HRS has developed a special bit for. If driving by and with a sledge, they have developed a fitting to make it less likely to mushroom the head of the picket.

This anchor plate has been pull tested end to end and withstood 44, 000 lbf of force. The ability of the plate to hold a load is clearly dependent on the soil in which the pickets are driven, but early testing R2T did with James was conducted in a moist, loamy soil and the anchor held to around 8000 lbf after it settled in a bit. The newest version of this plate has been revised and James said it can hold quite a bit more than the prototype and with less settling in movement as well. He’s hoping to have everything finalized and ready for production at the beginning of November. If you are interested in the plate or want more information, give James a shout at:

heavyrescuesolutions@gmail.com

Appalachian Doortex

Posted by rescue2training on September 26, 2012
Posted in: appalachian doortex, confined space rescue, firefighting, high angle, rope access, rope rescue, technical rescue, Uncategorized, vortex. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , . 8 comments

Here are some new AZV uses we at R2T have been testing to see the real world practicality of.  There are some earlier proof of concept pictures on the multimedia page, but these were done in exposure with a two person load. They’re all versions of what we’ve decided to call the Appalachian Doortex (APD), an obvious attempt at getting some East Coast love into the rope world.

The purpose of these APD is to create either an anchor, a high directional, or both simultaneously in the urban environment. The initial thought was for use in elevators, but can obviously work to create an anchor anywhere there is a solid block wall surrounding a door. We run A LOT of stalled elevators in in the city where I work, 15 a day is about average in our geographically small city. Not many require any rope work at all, but the one’s that do can be a real pain. Have you ever looked in an elevator lobby for anchors or a high directional? Not much around. That’s the problem we were trying to solve.

The “Ram’s Head” is the first version we came up with. In this configuration we hooked both MPDs right to the head of the APD; there was no guying, tying, or anything. The foot of the lazy leg was not resting against the opposite wall. Aside from a very minor initial settling in of the APD, it did not move during the operation. It was loaded with a two person load that was raised and lowered several times. One of the MPDs was hooked up in a fashion that caused it to bind against the head of the AZV a bit because it allowed us to have the operating handle facing outward. Because of the angle of the rope leaving the MPD into the elevator shaft, this very minor binding was felt not to be an issue.

Next up is an Upside Down APD, with no clever name given yet. Maybe the Appalachian Lean-To (ALT)? Yup we’ll go with that for now.  Just another way to make an anchor/HD combo. Also loaded with a two person load, operated up and down a bunch.

Here is the close up of the dual MPD anchoring on the Appalachian Lean-To.

Below are two pictures of what we used to keep the the Appalachian Lean-To from kicking back should it have wanted to. It didn’t want to. We had a dynomometer in there to see if there was any force trying to push the ALT away from the opening. The needle didn’t move at all during the operation. We were pulling against an extra leg section of an AZV run through two 4×6 blocks with holes drilled in them to keep the leg section from resting on a small, roll prone contact point on the hoistway doors. We’ve been calling them “Brace Blocks” (Appalachian Brace Blocks?) They worked really well. I suspect they can be used to help span doorways in buildings to create quick, simple anchors in a hallway.

While we have not tested a center pulled AZV leg to failure yet, this one was pulled to 500 lbs without any visible deflection. Further testing on this configuration will be conducted in the near future and we’ll let you know what we find out.

If anybody has any thoughts, questions or comments on this, or would like further training on operating on rope in an urban environment please feel free to leave a comment below or send Kelly an email directly at rescue-2@comcast.net.

Get Your Head out of the Sand

Posted by rescue2training on August 23, 2012
Posted in: confined space rescue, firefighting, high angle, rope rescue, technical rescue, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

From St. Paul Minnesota comes video and pictures of this confined space /trench / rope rescue incident where a worker fell down a hole that he had just bored in the sandy soil for a column for the light rail tracks. Thanks to Collin Moon from Elevated Safety for the heads up on this one.

Clever job by the St Paul guys using a horse collar to hand down to the guy in the pit to raise him up with. All in all a decent looking job done simply; the best way. If I could pick some things to improve, I’d definitely make the bight attached to the rescuers harness smaller, I’d probably control the operation with the rope instead of the bucket (which they may have done but it doesn’t look like it), and I would probably get the two guys out of the bucket during the operation.

Here is a link and two pictures of the incident. The CMC MPD looked to be used in this incident for the mainline.

http://www.firehouse.com/news/10761621/minn-crews-rescue-light-rail-worker-trapped-in-pit

http://twincitiesfirewire.com/2012/08/20/st-paul-crews-pull-worker-after-fall-into-hole/

Rescue in Sedona

Posted by rescue2training on August 20, 2012
Posted in: firefighting, high angle, rope rescue, technical rescue, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

While Sedona, AZ is the site of countless practice rope rescues thanks to being home to a couple of rope rescue schools, it was recently time to do the real deal.

Thunder Mountain was the location of this rescue after a hiker fell several feet of the trail and down into a ravine and was unable to climb back up due to his injury. Here is a link to the story:

HERE

One thing that was interesting to me is the three hour search for the victim. As an urban fireman, it is neat to see a different perspective of FD operations in n area with more wilderness than urban buildup. I’m pretty sure that if we had to search 3 hours for somebody, most guys would think we were on a wild goose chase after about 15 minutes; and in a big city they would probably be right. It is neat to see that smaller departments are equipped to handle emergencies like this that take longer to handle. Good job Sedona FD!

 

Here is one of the pictures from the article. Interesting to note the cross about 100 feet above the rescuer and victim. I’m curious (morbidly) if this was the site of a previous fatality.

 

Balls Out Rescue

Posted by rescue2training on August 7, 2012
Posted in: firefighting, high angle, rope rescue, technical rescue, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

Depending on which news report you read, a 22 year old female either “took a tumble” or fell 90 feet and suffered neck and back injuries as well as severe leg injuries after she fell from Balls Falls and had to be airlifted to a hospital. The technical rescue team decided against a rope system and instead carried her up the trail because of “poor lighting and safety issues.”  HERE

Here is a brief video of the falls:

If I fell from the top of that, I’d call it more than a tumble! While I was obviously not on the scene, it strikes me as odd that lighting is a reason to call off the possibility of a rope rescue. It speaks of the need to both equip your team to operate at night as well as train at night.While cliche, it is true that rescues don’t always happen when it is 72 and sunny.

And from just upstream of the Balls Falls rescue, was a group of three 20 year old guys climbing on the rocks beneath Horseshoe Falls in Niagara. Police rappelled 50 feet down to the group, busted them for disorderly conduct, reckless endangerment, and possession of a controlled substance. A threefor  while on rope! HERE

Busy times on rope for our neighbors to the north!

Lastly, a lucky close call for a couple and there dog in Northwest Spokane, WA after they’re Toyota pick flew 50 feet down an embankment and their trailer catapulted a few hundred feet further down the hill. It looks like Spokane Fire did a steep slope evacuation to get the patients up the hill. Do you have your game plan down for how your department does slope evacuations?

HERE

Weekend update with Bo Lin

Posted by rescue2training on July 29, 2012
Posted in: firefighting, high angle, rope access, rope rescue, technical rescue, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

Here are a few different rope articles to whet your kernmantle whistle for the weekend.

First up is an article from the Art of Manliness website sent to us by all around manly man and HazMat guru Jack Spencer. It showcases an exercise done in Navy BUD/S training where candidates tie knots underwater. It’s not a huge mental leap to figure out where this might be a useful process to go through: retrieving objects from under water, stabilization of vehicles in moving water, etc… If nothing else it will help break up the boredom of doing the same drill over and over again. There’s a ton of other cool things on this website that are not rope related, yet somehow are still manly.

Manly Link

Next up is a the way window washers SHOULD be rescued when hanging 35 floors up. The difference in the key words used to describe this incident is a pretty stark contrast to the way the FDNY described it’s window washer rescue: Professional, training, safe vs. dangerous, heroic, 45 minutes with a diamond tipped angle grinder, etc…  What I’m getting at is that these types of operations are difficult to PLAN for, they are relatively easy to PREPARE  for. The distinction being that you can’t know exactly where an incident like this will occur, but you can know that an incident like this will occur somewhere. Victim pick off should be a pretty straightforward option for a team that says they are capable of performing a rope rescue.

Video of pickoff

Article about the rescue

My kind of guy. Rescuer calls it “fun”

 

And last up is a rescue of a cliff jumper in Alabama. Not your Red Bull type extreme jumping, just a local swimming hole.  It looks like a combined ground and helo based plan. As we’ve stated before, the hallmark of a good team is to have a Plan B,C, and D in place. All of those moving pieces still didn’t prevent locals from going right back to jumping though.

 

Vide0s and stills of cliff rescue

 

Car vs Elevator

Posted by rescue2training on July 20, 2012
Posted in: firefighting, rope access, rope rescue, technical rescue. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

And the elevator shaft wins! A Lexus SUV was driven in to an elevator shaft designed for vehicles in a parking garage. The problem was, there was no elevator car there. According to the articles, the parking garage has 4 citations against it for elevator problems in the past two years. The driver of the vehicle also has 11 drivers license suspensions against him. It’s like the perfect storm of where you don’t want your vehicle to be parked.

 


Anyhow, they had to go down the shaft and extricate one of the workers, then stand by while the vehicle was recovered.

Here are two links to the story, the first has a video, the second has pictures.

 

http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/164983/two-injured-after-car-falls-down-garage-elevator-shaft?ap=1&MP4

 

http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20120717/upper-east-side/car-falls-down-elevator-shaft-upper-east-side-parking-garage

 

Shoulda Been a Rope Rescue

Posted by rescue2training on July 14, 2012
Posted in: firefighting, rope access, rope rescue, technical rescue, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a Comment

So… not being there it is hard to know, but from looking at the pictures and the videos from around the web it seems that maybe these window washers stuck waaaay up on the 42nd floor (but only a floor below an outside terrace) could have been rescued a bit quicker and with a much higher degree of safety than what you see here. I’m sure the guy on the scaffolding who has had this happen to him two times before this, has seen all the ways to do this rescue. Time for a new job for that guy.

I am aware of the friction between the FDNY the NYPD ESU team, but 4o minutes using a “diamond blade angle grinder” to cut the window and haul these guys in through a window doesn’t seem like the best way to do business. Why add the potential for falling glass to this operation if you don’t need to? I think there is a time and a place for cutting a window, but this just doesn’t seem like it.

If you have any comments, feel free to leave them below.

Here is a short video of the operation:

http://landing.newsinc.com/shared/video.html?freewheel=90051&sitesection=nydailynews&VID=23657684

A couple of pics:

http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local/new_york&id=8732245

Close the Door Please, I’m Busy in Here

Posted by rescue2training on June 1, 2012
Posted in: firefighting, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . 3 comments

While the title of this post might sound like a joke, it is a deadly serious fact that leaving a door open while searching a structure in fire conditions can lead a very bad ending, as we will see.

While at a fire recently in a two story single family dwelling,with  fire on the second floor and searching the room across the hallway from the room on fire, I decided to shut the door behind me to search the bedroom. It’s not something I normally do, as we’re fortunate enough to have aggressive companies who get water on the fire quickly and trucks who aren’t afraid to open up; so the need does not usually arise. However, beating the first due engine in and with a report of people trapped, we made our way to the second floor.

After getting into the bedroom, my partner and I shut the door behind us. That’s a pretty nerve wracking thing to do: shut a door in a house you’ve never been in and can’t see a thing in. It’s easy to miss a doorknob on the wide expanse of wall when trying to make your way  back out of that door. Anyhow, even though there was zero visibility and we were conducting our search on feel, it was a great comfort to feel the heat subside A LOT. It bought quite a bit of time on my mental search clock that lets me know when it is time to go. Thankfully, the engine was there quickly and we could hear them getting a knock on the fire.

The reason I mention this is that it really sunk in to me how much of the ongoing fire problem was eliminated for me just by shutting the door. So I started looking around at the importance of keeping doors shut while performing a search. Unfortunately I did not have to look far or in the distant past.  My looking about took me to my old department, Baltimore County, to a fire that killed FF Mark Falkenhan on Jan 19, 2011 who died from injuries sustained while searching on the top floor of a 3 story garden apartment.

The fire started as a first floor kitchen fire and rapidly spread to the two upper floors, ultimately entering the unit where FF Falkenhan was searching though an open door to the unit.

Two units, two very different results. The difference is that the unit on the left had the door closed during the fire. This was a powerful picture for me.

If you’re short on time, go to the 21:45 mark of the video  below. There are also two reports; one from the ATF and one from Baltimore County. Towards the end of the ATF report are the pictures of the conditions of different units from the fire.

The forward in the Balt. County internal report by the Fire Chief states that they essentially  could have done nothing different and that everything went pretty much according to plan. This despite the fact that they:

Have only 3 Battalion Chiefs for a 612 square mile area. It took the Batt. Chief 23 minutes to arrive on scene.

Had no good report from the rear about vertical fire extension.

No engine crew covering the search operation.

No back up hose line for initial attack crew.

Companies split laying on a working fire.

NO RIT TEAM!!

It’s easy to be an armchair fireground analyst, but these are systemic things that have not changed since I worked there for a short time in the late 90’s.

Falkenhan LODD ATF Report

Balt Co LODD internal report

Here is a video from the ATF from the modeling on this fire:

Things start going bad around the 21:45 mark of this video:

 

 

Towards the end of the video is are two alternate scenarios showing what might have happened with different doors being closed.