Rescue
Have a Little FUN During Rescue Training
While rescue training is serious business, as it should be, it can also be fun, as well as allowing skills to be tested and used Bob Twomey in personal and team building capacities. While I do subscribe to “training by the book” to get basic and advanced knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs), there is no reason training cannot be exercised in different, fun ways. This diversity in training is, of course, delegated to the unit’s training officer, but you know, the training officer doesn’t always need to wear starched underwear all the time! Experiment some and find new ways to test your members’ rescue skills in unique ways. Some years ago, after training my department in BRT, ART, ERT and RT curricula, I decided to challenge our members’ skills in unique ways. One of the most fun, but challenging exercises, was to test their knots, lashing and ladder rigging skills by performing the “vertical ladder” exercise. This skill set involved using a
6 Spring • 2021
certified 24-foot extension aluminum rescue ladder, extended to 18 feet. First, it required members to remember how to carry and deploy a rescue ladder — by the book — as we were taught in NCDOI Rescue College. The ladder was extended to the proper height while on sawhorses — or laid on wooden cribbing blocks on the ground. The lanyard was properly “tied off” on the rungs of the ladder, securing the fly to the bed. Then, the ladder fly and bed were further secured by the clove hitch-round turns-clove hitch method, like you would use in the standard ladder-as-a-derrick procedure. This again tested their memory and technical skill. Then, as if doing relative ladder-derrick procedures, four guy ropes were properly attached to the beams at the tip of the ladder, thus creating aft, fore and side guy ropes. This tested those practical skills. We also attached a rescuer safety line over the top rung and secured the running end to a low rung near the base of the ladder. Then, when we decided where the feet of the ladder would be placed once the ladder was raised up vertical, they were tested on where the anchor
Pictured: Fore, aft guy line ropes. Can add two side guy lines for added lateral stability. pickets should be placed relative to ladder position, as well as how far to place the pickets away from the ladder on all four sides. Remember, pickets are placed one and one-half to two times the extended length of the ladder, thus 27 to 36 feet from the base of the
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ladder. For simplicity’s sake, I train rescuers to two times anything is easier to calculate than one and onehalf times anything, if site conditions allow. So, picket placement skills are tested, including the angle placement see HAVE FUN page 8
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