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Tools of the Trade
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.
Jaws of life, based in Shelby, NC!
Your wife is great! She handles that air chisel like a pro.
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.
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.)
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.
Maybe because that links to m.youtube their mobile app, and it’s a “short” which never embeds anyway.
Let’s see what happens without the m and the “shorts”
I suppose it’s less of a problem now, but I’ve read that in the past, like maybe from the 50s into the 70s or something, the quality of steel being used in passenger cars and trucks was improving so rapidly that fire/rescue people found that jaws-of-life type equipment fairly recently acquired wasn’t up to the current job.
Hope not produced on demand. :-)
Wait for it…
Each generation of tools has gotten better and better. At one time, for example, Volvo and Subaru had internal roll cages that the first couple of generations of tools couldn’t cut. That’s pretty much been overcome. Our big challenges now are EV and hybrid drivetrains and batteries.
My dad was part of our local volunteer ambulance corps for forty years. Even back in the Seventies, I was amazed at the difference between the newer trucks and the older, Cadillac-based ambulances. This is a great post and thread. Totally right that back then, the ambulance’s vital role was a rapid delivery service, it didn’t yet include being what amounts to an extension of the emergency room.
Worth watching the 2-part/2-hour premiere episode of “Emergency!”
Also worth noting that actor/singer/teen-heart-throb Bobby Sherman, who played a rather conceited new doctor in one episode, later became a paramedic himself and was involved in paramedic training for years.
Original home of David Thompson, NC State’s great basketball player . . .
Since you mentioned tankers, one of the trucks in the volunteer fire department on which my father served in the mid-1960s was a WWII tank truck (I do not know if it was a 2.5 ton or a 5 ton). The U.S. Forest Service had the truck for many years after the war and had installed a metal tractor seat on the right front fender to use in fighting small brush fires (Firefighter sits on the seat with a fire hose from the tank, directing water on the fire). Small lightning-induced brush fires is why the fire department obtained the truck from the Forest Service.
One of the small town volunteer fire department’s jobs was to water the several recently planted trees on the perimeter of the one park in town, which became a job for my brother and me (ages 8 and 10). We’d take turns sitting on the fender seat with a small fire hose as our father drove around the park perimeter, and we’d water the trees.
Probably violates any number of laws, rules, and policies today, but we loved it, and it gave my brother and me responsibility to help the town and its people.
Sounds like fun!
Of all the stuff I learned at extrication school the biggest surprise was how seatbelt pre-tensioners work. I always thought it was all mechanical but it is in fact a pyro charge for each belt. That’s how they jerk you back so hard.
I spent about 25 years in a couple of VFD’s. I’ve been out of it for a little over ten.
I still scan a professional publication, Fire Engineering, which more often than not is focused more towards the career firefighters. Most of firefighting hasn’t changed, though there are differences on the margins. When I started, ventilating a structure involved putting fans, lots of fans, inside the structure and blow the smoke out. During my time, they came up with “positive pressure” ventilation where one big honkin fan was placed outside the structure, and blew the smoke out that way. Of course you wouldn’t start those ops until after the fire was extinguished.
Training in vehicle fires has changed to reflect that many of them have lots of batteries. In many cases, there’s no extinguishing those fires, you have to let them burn. And in bigger cities, shops that sell battery operated scooters and bicycles have had battery fires, and fire department associations have been lobbying for increased regulation of batteries.
Protective gear has gotten better, and firefighters are able to endure more heat as a result. But that also means they can get more aggressive than they should. During live fire trainings, firefighters were moving so close to the seat of the fire before extinguishing it, they were melting their helmets. Career (and probably VFD’s) started disciplining firefighters that would do that during such training.
I mentioned training; training mockups have gotten better, and more realistic. And that has been necessary because fire safety code expansion has reduced the number of structure fires.
Getting back to vehicle extrication, the equipment has also gotten lighter. Newer jaws of life are now battery operated (which may mean that the battery pack may not be lighter). You don’t have to maintain a generator, and presumably the hydraulic fluid that kind of system comes with.
As I said, a lot hasn’t changed. You still break windows using the same techniques, go through locked doors the same way, and you still ventilate a roof using the same methods as before.
Ladder training hasn’t significantly changed. Packing hose (reverse lay, forward lay) and deploying hose correctly hasn’t change either.
As VFD’s could afford it, most started buying the bigger engines and trucks, and some bought all purpose rigs that became big. For rural fire departments whose service area consists of out of the way residences with driveways that wind back and forth have had problems bringing those bigger engines to the residence. Maybe that was a mistake.
My day job is IT, and many of the operating systems I learned 20 years ago have changed so much, a person with 5 years experience is almost equal in knowledge as a 20 year person.
Not so in firefighting. What you learned 20-30 years ago is still useful knowledge.
I will say that advanced EMT skills and medicine in general has changed significantly from 20 years ago. CPR hasn’t changed all that much, doing the ABC’s of basic patient assessment hasn’t changed, but as soon as you start the advanced stuff, including drugs, and some of the electronics used to monitor a patient, a person who learned the craft 20 years ago wouldn’t recognize the craft, beyond EMT basic.
The OP mentioned the fun training, smashing up vehicles with the “jaws.” A lot of boring training comes with it. Deploying hose lays and packing it up, over and over, so it becomes muscle memory. Deploying a ladder safely. Climbing a ladder, and techniques of bringing equipment up to the roof (don’t forget to fire up that chainsaw first and turn it off; wanna make sure it works). You better know your knots.
And if you have been in the service long enough, how about the politics between neighboring fire departments, both career (usually union) and other VFD’s? I thought I’d mention that in passing because this is a site about politics.
Someone asked me a few days ago, whether I miss it or not. I was in long enough to where I don’t. I got out just in time. I was getting cynical, but I wasn’t showing it. I got out with most of the department wanting more from me.
@alsparks, that’s all on the money. We have resisted the bigger truck trend and we are better off for it. Most of the bigger departments we work with have gigantic rescue trucks that can’t get anywhere near the scene if it involves going off road anywhere. We often have to transport a patient in a brush truck or that small rescue truck to an ambulance because it can’t get close enough. That truck is a 4×4 and we carry a stokes basket along with a multitude of other equipment. And seating for 5.
As far as politics, the big issue we face is people clamoring for Emergency Service Districts, which are taxing entities that inevitably put the VFD’s out of business. The local knowledge goes away. If a car takes out a fence I know who to call to keep the livestock in, and where the impossible to find gravel ranch roads are. It’s probably inevitable but it’s a sad thing to see.
One thing I have noticed is the huge increase in lift assists. That’s basically picking up people who have fallen and don’t have anyone strong enough to get them up off the floor. It’s usually either in the bathroom or getting out of bed to go to the bathroom. As the huge cohort of boomers is aging this will only get worse. We have been trying to convince our EMS director to start a community paramedic program. Taking an emergency crew out of service to pick someone up means they are unavailable for real life threatening emergencies. I suspect this problem is the same all over the country.
Years ago I read in an emergency services magazine an article written by a paramedic, whose area of responsibility included blocks of high-rise public housing. He wrote of how these calls were frequent causes of injuries to the medical people. He said, “local kids thought ‘Holstein’ was a medical term.”
My preferred term is “horizontally gifted.”
This is a big deal. What many (most / nearly everybody) don’t realize that, once activated, they must be replaced.
Absolutely right. They are usually between the tub/sink and toilet. We haven’t had a structure fire in five years. All my calls were car accidents and medical. I retired from all that except for the dive team. All the training really got in the way.
We keep our extrication tools on the primary engine. That way you don’t have to roll two vehicles. I have never seen the metal sheers before. It seems like a waste of time. I usually just stab the car with the spreaders and open it up. Also, I would have made the car your showing a convertible.