« The myth of the 50 state strategy | Main | Houseless, but not homeless »
June 28, 2006
Urban Search and Rescue
The building above is the old Travis House apartment building. Decades ago it was the Austin YWCA. A few years back I think it was some kind of halfway house. Now it's abandoned, condemned, all windows boarded up. If you wander around inside, you'll find it full of debris, broken glass, standing water, and a completely destroyed industrial kitchen.
No power, thus no AC. No light, not even from the windows, since they're boarded up.
Nowadays it's owned by the Austin Fire Department, which made it an ideal place for us to do an urban search and rescue exercise on Saturday. With full gear, fake victims inside, a complete simulation.
The first exercise, a tour organized and guided by the instructors, I got assigned to a fire team, which basically meant I would go in first, carrying an 18 pound fire extinguisher with one hand and a flashlight in the other, looking for smoldering hotspots to put them out before the search teams could come through looking for victims and hazards. After we got our briefing, I took off my overloaded 24-hour pack and set it on the ground and the instructor laughed and said "Oh no...you'll need that pack to survive".
So we did a room-to-room search, humping fire extinguisher, full pack, dust mask, googles, helmet with headlamp, and flashlight. Three teams searched three floors. By the time we came out, we looked like we'd taken a shower in our clothes, completely drenched in sweat.
The second exercise, the instructors basically picked a student at random and said "You're the incident commander...there's been a tornado and victims are trapped inside. You need to search the three basement levels. Organize and make it happen." And then they stood back and watched. And timed us.
Basement levels? Ulp.
I've never done any training that felt so real. I got assigned to a search team to search the second underground level, and as soon as we headed down the basement stairs, we enountered the fog machine that they'd added to make it interesting.
Pitch black, in fog, in an industrial basement with no map, with only the "left hand rule" or "right hand rule" to keep you on course without getting lost in the dark. Almost immediately my partner and I found a baby in a broken elevator. And this is where you discover how training and reality can get all tangled up in your head when you're disoriented and stressed and exhausted. We had been told that search teams do not pull out non-ambulatory victims, they just note where they are and report back later so that a rescue team can go in. But it was a baby. And that seemed weird. We weren't sure what to do. But we noted her, started to move on, and the instructor had to break character to tell us, "If it's a baby or small child, you always pull them out immediately." Common sense, right? Well, a lot of things that are common sense in a dark smokey basement are actually dangerous, and we had fallen back on our training, but our training was incomplete.
So we go back, we grab the baby, we run back upstairs and out of the building to take the infant to triage, and the first thing the medic says is "Is she breathing?"
Fuck. We hadn't even checked. The panic of "get the baby out" made us forget all the basic rules of first aid. We hadn't checked airways, we hadn't checked for signs of injury, we hadn't done anything but grab the baby and run for it. If it had been a real baby, we might have killed it.
We blathered some lame excuse about "unresponsive" and handed it off and headed back in.
More screwups followed later. Coming out after a search and reporting an unconscious victim under debris, but in our quest to get water while we debriefed, we forgot to report the victim to the one person who was responsible for sending a rescue team in. So the victim sat under debris for an extra 20 minutes until the mistake was discovered.
Don't get me wrong. All in all we did a fantastic job. My fellow trainees were a great assortment of professionals and volunteers, all of whom took their training very seriously. But it made me think of a recent discussion over at Mr. Clio's bemoaning the fact that only trained personnel are being allowed to search for bodies in New Orleans. The thing is, there is a lot to know to be able to do this stuff in a safe and effective manner, and vigilante rescue heroes can often make a bad situation worse.
That being said, the training for Urban Search and Rescue is not especially time consuming, and although it requires a reasonable amount of physical fitness, it's not something that needs a Navy SEAL attitude or physique. I'm certainly not triathlete material.
I chatted with the instructor Saturday about my upcoming move to New Orleans, and bemoaning the fact that there doesn't seem to be any sort of CERT organization there or much in the way of volunteer SAR teams, and he strongly encouraged me that with a little effort and research and recruiting, I could start one myself. We would need to make some connections with local authorities, but we could form a private, volunteer, non-government-affiliated 501(c)3 Search and Rescue outfit with a minimum of five people willing to do the training. We then charter ourselves through the organization that ran the Saturday training, and we become an official search and rescue resource which can be activated during emergencies.
Those of you bemoaning the fact that "only trained professionals need apply", and those of you looking for volunteer opportunities for the next storm, here's an opportunity to become one of those trained professionals on a part time volunteer basis.
When I get to town, I'm going to look into doing this. I'll be looking for volunteers to help. Folks with military, police, fire, or EMS background are especially valuable, but it's not required. Myself, I'm just a regular shmoe who went through some training.
This would be a grass roots effort. Based locally, self-funded, nationally chartered, and hopefully with at least some sort of official buy-in from a local authority. I might hit up Stacy Head with the initial idea since she seems to be the one who gets things done in that town.
Who's with me?
Posted by ray at June 28, 2006 11:43 PM | Permalink
Categories: [austin | katrina | new orleans ]
Comments
I'm in, sir. And I've got experience writing grants and raising money, so if we need to go track down funds to get started, I'm on that.
Keep in touch. Thank you for exploring this. I hope we get lots of training and that we never have to use it. But I wanna be ready for the next b**** that might roar through.
Posted by: Mr. Clio at June 29, 2006 7:11 AM
Great post. You had my heart beating a little faster, just reading about the exercise. Back in another life, I was a flight attendant for MississippiRiverLand Airlines (not its real name) and we went through crash simulations with smoke and deafening noise, simulated fire (and sometimes surprise water) and victims as part of our training. It could get intense.
I think it's very cool that you're doing this (organizing a volunteer search and rescue unit in NOLA). I'm betting you can get much of the admin donated and will find no shortage of volunteers.
I did get to see "Drowning New Orleans" yesterday afternoon. Thank you so much for the heads up. I thought it was pretty powerful, particularly the footage taken by the two groups of fire fighters. Watching it really brought back memories of that weekend, glued to TWC, CNN and the NOAA website, and waiting. The date August 29 was in my head all summer, because it was the day that my son's classes were to resume. I remember calling him mid-afternoon Friday, telling him to gather his friends and fill the gas tanks, warning him to not stay out too late and to get up Saturday morning and leave for home the minute the U cancelled Monday's classes. I also told him to bring as much as he could possibly fit in the car (there were about eight of them in two cars coming to Atlanta), adamantly insisting he bring, at the very least, his laptop and the best mandolin, because it looked to me like it might be a while before he could be going back. He laughed at me (of course). The PowerBook made it but he had to retrieve the mando in November. He brought the shorts and sandals he was wearing and a couple of t-shirts and underwear, what he could fit in one back pack. I have to admit that it was actually a wonderful surprise gift on the back side of the tragedy, having him home unexpectedly for last fall.
Enough rambling (sorry). May you and yours have a nice 4th, uneventful packing and the best possible move!
Posted by: Sophmom at June 29, 2006 9:41 AM
Wow - awesome and reality check experience.
Posted by: Kristi at June 29, 2006 5:12 PM
What about http://www.selsar.com/
Posted by: noname at July 24, 2006 1:29 PM
Yeah, I found that. I need to contact them to see how individuals can contribute. They seem somewhat geared towards professionals.
Posted by: Ray at July 24, 2006 4:30 PM
Ray,
I think you were in the class we taught. This is an assume summary of that weekends training. How is the team coming in New Orleans? Any luck getting it set up? Let me know as we now have a team starting up in Kenner that you might be able to join. check out our website and good luck.
Posted by: Alan at October 30, 2008 12:49 PM
Hi Alan,
Good to hear from you. Unfortunately circumstances in my personal life didn't allow me the amount of time and focus to get a team off the ground from scratch. CERT in New Orleans is fairly disorganized. There is a team here called SELA TF-1, but they are under the umbrella of the NOFD and although they do allow civilian volunteers, they are mostly NOFD profressionals, the training and on-call schedule is designed in such a way that my employer was unwilling to let me have the required flexibility in my schedule to participate.
Thanks for the reference to the Kenner group, I will definitely look them up.
Posted by: Ray at October 30, 2008 1:09 PM
Post a comment