“It’s not safe for us to just go into a residence that’s weakened at some point to pull somebody out,” he said.

That’s a main reason behind the station’s focus on building collapse response and with the new truck, Hasty said they can accomplish a lot more when it comes to technical rescue. 

“Our concern is that in the county there is no type of trench rescue, no type of building collapse. We do small-scale stuff but we don’t do any type of high-angle and that’s stuff we need to focus on,” Hasty said.

“Now we can pursue that now that we have the bigger truck and we’re able to carry double the amount of equipment so we can better advance our rescue operations.

Hasty said the station plans to beef up equipment for building collapse, trench rescue and rope rescue. 

“We currently do low-angle rope rescue but we’d like to take that a little further and start doing high-angle rescue in the county,” he said. 

Technical rope rescue is broken down into three parts – low, steep and high angle rescue – all determined by the degree of slope in rescue situations. 

Station No. 1 firefighters got a chance to practice their building collapse skills for the first time this year during a recent mock tornado drill at the fairgrounds. 

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