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We try to keep our training current and vary it to keep people’s interest. We occasionally have to extricate someone from a wrecked car or truck; the upside is extrication training involves tearing up cars, which is incredibly fun. A local tow company provides totaled cars when we ask, and delivers them to our station.
This Tuesday we took the car they provided and used truck-mounted winches to stand it on the driver’s side, put up stabilizing struts, and then did a small amount of cutting with our air chisel. Now, an air chisel is a very useful automotive tool but it typically requires a big compressor; this is a special tool that uses a spare air pack bottle. We carry this tool along with a full set of hydraulic tools (Jaws of Life) in what is basically an F350 pickup, along with medical gear and an assortment of other tools.
Mrs. Tex loves cutting up cars so she jumped on the air chisel first. We are a relatively small rural fire department; over the last 15 years or so our calls have become about 60 percent medical so we have a bunch of EMTs and Paramedics now. Extrications are much more rare but it's one of those things we have to be able to do fairly quickly. Today was fun as we got to sit in the (air-conditioned) trucks in a parade and throw candy for kids.
Anyway, enjoy the video of Mrs. Tex cutting the roof. BTW, it was 97 degrees F that afternoon. You can see the struts and the winch cable we used to turn the truck over. I don’t usually have trouble embedding videos but for this one, I had to add a link.
Discussion (21)
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Jaws of life, based in Shelby, NC!
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Your wife is great! She handles that air chisel like a pro.
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You can see the cutter in one picture - the spreader tool is next to it. Battery powered. Amazing stuff - push one button and you have about 45 minutes of cutting time per battery. The Ajax tool is in the red box and there is a grocery bag with stuffed animals for kids.
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My father was a volunteer firefighter in a small town in Florida in the mid-1960s. The town police department shared a building with the fire department, and so as a kid I got to know most of the police officers, and got to do several informal ride-alongs with the police. The police department had 3 cars total!
Last week our neighborhood homeowners' association (I'm in north-central Texas) had an evening meet-and-greet with our town fire department (paid firefighters), county ambulance service, and town police department. Each brought a vehicle.
The contrast between emergency vehicle contents of my childhood sixty years ago and today was striking.
The big thing that struck me is how much more equipment each carried than what was common 60 years ago. Now I understand why fire trucks are so much bigger than the fire trucks I remember as a kid. While we were there, the fire department got a brand new truck that was built on a medium duty commercial Ford truck chassis. Nowadays I understand almost all fire trucks are so large they are built on custom chassis. A larger town near my childhood town did buy some larger custom-built American LaFrance fire trucks.
My father's fire department was focused almost entirely on fires. I don't remember them having much to do with car crashes. I don't think the Jaws-of-Life had been developed at that time (or at least if it had it was not affordable for a tiny town volunteer fire department).
The ambulance difference between 60 years ago and today was most striking. Sixty years ago, the primary purpose of the ambulance was to transport the patient to a hospital as quickly as possible, doing only the minimum treatment to try to keep the patient alive during transport (mostly stem the bleeding and maybe deliver oxygen). So the small town I was in had decided to use station wagons as police cars, with stretchers in the back, and use the police cars as the primary "ambulance." In a medical emergency, the police officer likely would be to be the first to arrive on scene. The police officer was expected to try his best to stem the bleeding, put the injured in the back of his car, and race to the hospital in the larger nearby town. Come back later for the investigation and paperwork. The town was too small to justify having separate ambulances and emergency medical people waiting for an emergency. But now ambulances (and the paramedics and EMTs who staff them) do a substantial amount of treatment on-site and during transport, requiring a bunch more equipment.
(I also noted that the fire department in my current town has several EMT/firefighters, since the majority of their calls are actually medical calls, not fire calls. The firefighters also told me that even though it's a town department, they cover most of the southern half of our county, and a non-trivial portion of the northern half of the county, all of which is outside the town limits.)
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Engines and rescue trucks have in many cases become huge, and sometimes they are speced out to do too many things. Our engine is a 2002 model and every year we pass the pump inspection with flying colors. One thing about rural firefighting is that we have to bring water to the scene so our engine, for one example, carries 1500 gallons, three times what a municipal engine usually carries. We all also operate water tenders (we used to call them tankers until someone got mixed up on a big fire and thought an aerial tanker had been ordered up). A house fire usually takes about 15000+ gallons to extinguish and sometimes more for the clean up and overhaul. We cover 43 square miles with a population of about 4000 people with 20 firefighters. 5 are paramedics and 5 are EMT’s.
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