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Richard Marinucci |
Auto extrication requires teamwork, practice, staffing, and the proper tools. The job is getting more complex as automobiles and other vehicles on the road have more options and variances.
This challenges firefighters and officers who act as incident commanders to continually learn as much as they can while struggling to find the time to prepare for all types of emergencies. Regardless, organizations that want to make a difference must commit to improvement through preparation. This includes staying current on the latest tools and finding opportunities to practice, preferably on newer vehicles.
Extrication Objectives
There are two main objectives for extrication: rapidly removing and properly treating the injured. Both require skills, though not necessarily the same ones. Treatment probably is the more frequent application as medics, emergency medical technicians, and first responders take care of patients regardless of how they suffered the trauma. Extrications are generally not as frequent and therefore require more practice to obtain and maintain competence. To make it even more challenging, many crashes today involve fewer entrapments because of improvements in vehicle construction.
Training
Most, if not all, firefighting operations require teamwork whether for a medical call, fire, or extrication. Creating teamwork can be a challenge regardless of the type of department - all career, combination, or volunteer. In career organizations, between leave time, shift trades, and reassignments, it can be challenging to get the same crews together consistently to improve teamwork. It is not better in other organizations where personnel response is not likely to be the same from day to day. The only way to overcome this is to have very consistent policies and procedures and train to competence on these policies and procedures. Simplified, it means that as personnel are assigned, the expectation of performance is reliable. To put it another way, take a sports team. Members must know their roles. If there is a need for a substitution, the rest of the team can expect little, if any, drop-off in performance.
Practice, practice, practice! This is much easier said than done. Even in organizations with exemplary training programs, there is the ongoing challenge of finding the time to repeat skills enough to become as close to unconsciously competent as possible. Members expected to use particular tools must know their operation, indications of when they are best used, and their limitations. You will need to be good with power tools and hand tools. Proper shoring is essential for both safety and expedience. Departments should inventory all tools that are likely to be used during an extrication and create a spreadsheet to track training on all tools. There are some who will require more frequent training to maintain competence than others. But, all need occasional review.
Staffing on apparatus in many departments may not be adequate for the complex nature of some extrications. This can slow an operation or even create some situations where certain techniques cannot be performed because there are not enough hands. Some initial dispatches are made with a very basic response. Those who arrive first should receive training so they recognize sooner that a particular event will require additional resources. This is not any different than a structure fire that calls for multiple alarms. Many times, senior officers are not dispatched to crashes if there is not specific dispatch information. As such, ju