Firefighters prepare for wide range of situations
By Christine Haines
chaines@yourmvi.com
Wednesday evenings mean training for members of Central Volunteer Fire Company in Elizabeth Township, with two sessions to update skills every month.
The fire company officers try to come up with new scenarios for each session, giving members a wide variety of experiences to draw upon in the field, according to Randy Hoke, the rescue captain for the department.
“You brainstorm and think about situations that could potentially happen,” Hoke said. “Training allows our members to retain the information and skills in their memory, and if needed, to be utilized in a rapid decision-making process.”
Hoke said the department has a number of junk vehicles used for various extrication practices, but a car that runs was recently donated to them, so they are able to move it around to create different scenarios.
The recent training used that vehicle to give firefighters experience doing rescue drills in a standard-size residential garage so they would have a sense of the space restrictions they would face in an actual situation.
Hoke reminds members that there are many ways to do the job. The purpose of training isn’t to provide an instruction manual to be followed to the letter, but a thought process to be developed and adopted to the circumstances of an emergency.
The most recent training exercise looked at various scenarios that could occur in a residential garage: a child who was playing is hit and stuck under the car, a person trapped under the front of a vehicle that was accidentally put into gear and a person trapped under a vehicle when a jack failed while the owner was working on the car.
“We would have to crib the vehicle to stabilize it, then we’d have to raise the vehicle high enough to get the victim out. The cribbing would act as a fulcrum,” Hoke said. “Each scenario consisted of strategic stabilization and lifting methods to free the victims without causing more injuries than they have already suffered.”
To read the rest of the story, please see a copy of Tuesday’s Mon Valley Independent, call 724-314-0035 to subscribe or subscribe to our online edition at http://monvalleyindependent.com.
