Making
sure rescuers come home
Bill Henry
Friday, June 14, 2002 - 9:00:00 AM
NEWS - It’s in their nature.
Firefighters want to save lives, often needlessly risking their own.
“We’ve got to take chances to save lives,” city firefighter and diver Scott
Fleer said Thursday. “Too often we take too many chances.”
That’s been the central point during team training this week prompted to a large
degree by an inquest’s recommendations after a Cambridge area diver lost his life on
a river rescue.
Since then, Owen Sound Fire and Emergency Services Dive Rescue and Recovery Team and
similar public safety divers are required to meet the labour ministry’s commercial
diving regulations and standards. They were often overlooked by firefighters with only
recreational credentials and equipment before the incident.
The Owen Sound team has now upgraded diving equipment and this week’s four days of
detailed team training brings rescue and recovery practise well above accepted standards,
Fleer said.
“Nothing is left to chance. Every possibility is considered. There’s
contingencies for almost any event.”
Divers and their tenders and on-site safety and fire command staff spent Thursday going
through simulations. They located a baby overboard and handgun-sized evidence, and cut
loose an entangled diver, among other exercises.
“All the things that we can think of that can possibly go wrong, we’re going to
be practising here,” said New York state-based trainer Andrea Zaferes.
“It’s a holistic approach. For drowning victims to have a shot everything has to
be right. Everyone on scene has to do their job perfectly.”
Lifeguard Systems trains as many as 2,000 people in 15 countries yearly to the highest
standards in all types of water rescue. The main focus of the rapid deployment search and
rescue/recovery program is safety.
Zaferes said it takes an adult 60 seconds to drown, a child 20 seconds. Rescuers have at
most a little more than an hour to recover and resuscitate.
The longest a drowning victim is know to have been underwater and survived was a child in
Alaska brought to the surface and revived after 66 minutes.
So if it’s been much longer than an hour and divers are working in hazardous
conditions, they need to shut down and come back when it’s safe. Then it’s a
recovery, not a rescue.
And divers must have back-up divers, and other systems in place before going in after
victims, despite what people see on TV and may expect.
“The person who’s on the bottom is dead. There’s a chance we can
resuscitate him, and that’s the goal here. But the most important person is that
firefighter,” Zaferes said.
“Whatever the worst case scenario is, if I can’t get my diver out, they
don’t belong going in. It’s unacceptable for a firefighter to not go home, is
our philosophy. One hundred per cent of the time they have to go home.”
“There’s something called the nature of the beast. Firefighters have it, I
think, more than almost everybody. They want to save someone. It’s in their blood.
It’s in their heart. If they know that kid is in that car that just went off the
bridge, that beast is going to push them to get in that car even if they don’t have a
back up diver and they don’t have everything they need.”
Training also covered where to look for victims, how to interview witnesses, which
includes re-enacting what they saw, and how to handle victims.
“That drowning victim is extremely fragile. Just shaking that drowning victim or
dropping that drowning victim greatly reduces the chances of him coming back,” she
said.
Along with OPP divers based in Barrie, the Owen Sound team is the only rescue and recovery
dive team in the Grey-Bruce area, with seven divers and support.
Zaferes said the team was much better-equipped and trained even before this week.
“These guys are light years ahead of most diving teams, but still realize they need
more training, so they’re actually now getting true public safety diving
training,” she said.
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