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Airbags in the Dark
How often do you practice with these?
So, we all have these on some piece of our fleet. Most places will have a set of these on every truck.
The questions that I want to pose are these: How often do you drill with them? What are the instances that you would use them? Do you every practice with gloves and low/zero visibility?
I know that where I am we don’t use these very often but the potential certainly is there. I have seen many drills where they get aired up and then put away. It is also important to understand where they are useful other than vehicle rescues.
The main area I am pointing to here is RIT or FAST activities. If you include this in your RIT cache, do you regularly drill in zero or low visibility. Let me tell you, it is a totally different experience.
You must understand leverage points and counter points or balances. Whatever terminology you want to use, if you lift from one side, you have to expect the opposite to move as well.
So, when you drill for these, lift something, anything, like pallets with full visibility. Watch what happens to the opposite side of the lift and make notes. When you get into the dark you will have to crib, raise, and lower all by feel. Oh, and up on red and down on blue is difficult at best.
After training, let us know how you identify the difference and how you communicate those instructions.
Keep up the good work and train hard.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by M.J. 6821 on
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We don't have airbags on our dept. but one thing that we have done is practiced how to use all of our extrication tools in the dark so that if all you have available is a flashlight right away you can focus the light on where you are working and not what your hands are doing.
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Permalink Reply by Jason Hoevelmann on
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Great idea, thanks for sharing and stay safe.
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We have portable lights too but sometimes it's a lil faster just to use the big flashlights.
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It's not so much the dark, but smoked up atmospheres that a RIT crew may have to work in. And, flashlights have batteries which can go dead.
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And with portable lights you can have issues with the generator or whatever powersource your using and depending on what type of light you are using the bulbs can break just by getting tipped over or getting water on them.
Each of our rigs has 3 of the streamlight rechargeable lanterns, while most trucks only have one or two of the portable lights and if you are doing extrication on more than one vehicle or on a side of the vehicle where the lights on the apparatus can't reach it sometimes takes too long to get portable lights set up.
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Permalink Reply by Kevin Hatfield on
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Our department carries similar bags ... most of our training is on the High Pressure Bags and the large Low pressure one, as far as the "tube bag" or the "wrap bag" we dont really train that much with them, as for low light, we try and do the best with lighting the scene as we can either with the large command lights on our trucks or portable command lighting, all training is suppose to be done with gloves, but I am guilty when it comes to not wearing them. We use a rescue glove not a structural glove when it comes to extrication or any type of rescue effort, it gives more feel and allows easier use of the quick connect and controls.
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