Men of steel rip up wrecks to rescue us
Published: June 29, 2007
Every little boy wants to be a fire fighter. Maybe its that hero com plex we fantasize about. Certainly there’s no one more dashing than the helmeted man in the reflective yellow coat who saves the family home . . . and rescues Mrs. McGillicuddy’s kitty on the way back to the station.
But there’s a different aspect to being a firefighter, one thats just flat ugly. Firefighters also are the ones who head to car wrecks, and they cut you and me out of the mangled wreckage. Forget the Nash, save my . . . life.
Gary Klauss, a Warrensville Heights firefighter, and Terry Salvi, of the Bedford department, are experts in that field. In addition to their day jobs, they are field reps for Howell Rescue Systems, which makes tools used to get victims out of car wrecks.
One recent Friday, I joined Klauss, Salvi and a dozen firefighters from various local departments for a crash course on how to extricate people trapped in what’s left of their cars.
We spent two hours in the classroom going over the basics. Make sure you have your equipment before you leave the station. Know where it is on the truck. Know your assignment. Think about what you need, what you might need and how you might get what you might need. As you roll up to the scene, keep your eyes busy, especially if it’s a rollover, in which case victims are likely to have been ejected. Get plenty of light on the job. Be aware of the situation.
That last is critical. As we stepped outside for the first car, Klauss had one of our number do a walk-around. What did he see?
All the windows up. One airbag deployed. One (imaginary) unconscious victim in the driver’s side. Omigosh! A car seat in the back! But where’s the baby?!
The first step in any extrication is to assess the victim’s condition. So how do we get in?
Try the door. Sometimes the obvious is the easiest. If that doesn’t work, move on to the tools of the trade: cutters, spreaders and rams.
Cutters look like giant crab pincers. Spreaders look like the Jolly Green Giant’s pliers and are even heavier. Both treat steel like spaghetti noodles. Rams are telescoping rods that can exert 30,000 pounds of pressure - enough to get a dashboard off a victim. Anything strong enough to do the job these tools do has to be pretty solid, so it’s no surprise that the 29-pound cutters are among the lightest tools a firefighter uses in a rescue.
You know those sculpted bodies you see on firefighter calendars? Now you know how they get them. And it’s equally obvious why you never see feature reporters calendars. “Bunkered up” in full firefighter regalia - helmet, boots, jacket, pants, Nomex, goggles, gloves - I used every one of those tools at some course during the day. And by the time we finished cutting up that Mazda RX-7 with the caved-in roof, I was sweating like a hooker in church.
One of the first things a firefighter does is break the windows with a snap punch, or a Halligan bar (like a huge crowbar, with a punch on one end and the claw of a hammer on the other). That’s because once they get to work on the steel, it’s going to explode anyway. Make sure the victim knows what’s going on, Klauss said.
After flattening the tires or bracing the car to keep it stable and killing the batteries to make sure undeployed airbags don’t go off, firefighters tackle the different “posts” that create a steel cage for the vehicle occupants.
The A post is the front where the door hinges, the B post is where the back door hinges and so forth. Which gets cut first depends on the situation. Sometimes, no posts get cut, as in a Grand Prix we demolished. It was a simulated rollover that had ended up on its roof. We tunneled through the trunk.
Be careful what you carry in your car. I’m not sure where they got these vehicles, but I know they were real accidents. That would explain why we had to move a copier, some tools and even underwear to get to the driver’s compartment in that Grand Prix. The RX-7 had a glove box of shards that used to be Bone Thugs-N-Harmony CDs.
There is some humor in all this: Klauss said in one class a firefighter was too genteel when breaking windows. He didn’t want to scratch the paint.
Klauss said he’s never heard someone trapped in what used to be a car hollering about scratched paint.
Then there was the guy pinned by his car when the jack slipped. Firefighters got him out, and he was full of gratitude. So you have to wonder whose idea it was to send his saviors a bill for the gas tank they ruptured when they saved his bacon.
Ah, the life of a hero.
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