| A situation may arise where a firefighter may need to make an escape from a burning building or a hazardous area. Sometimes a window is the only point of egress for the firefighter. In order to train for a scenario like this, we traveled (along with firefighters from the Union Fire District) to the training facility in South Kingstown on Sunday, June 22nd. The purpose of the training was a hands-on practical for self rescue / bail out. A week earlier we had a classroom training where we discussed safety on the fireground and got familiarized with our rope rescue bags.
For the training, we had an extra safety system in place just in case things went astray. The safety system consisted of the firefighter wearing an additional Class II harness underneath their bunker pants. This harness was then attached to a belay system. The belay system was constructed using dynamic rope along with a ladder truck from the Union Fire District. The belay system prevented the firefighter from falling down in the event that he/she was unable to control their descent.
All firefighters had the chance to bail out of a window three times. For the first instance, we were in our full turnout gear and anchored our life safety rope to a handrail inside of the building. For the second instance, we anchored the rope the same way but we had an SCBA pack on. This gave us a feel for the additional weight that we would have on our back in this type of scenario. For the third instance, we kept the SCBA pack on and we drove a Haligan tool through the subfloor in the building. This served as our anchor point. We then tied our life safety rope to the tool and continued with our descent.
A special thanks to our instructor, Chris, for a job well down. We look forward to working / training with firefighters from the Union Fire District in the future. |
