The ever dreaded thought about having to rescue one of our own. A role where NOBODY wants to play the victim. Your fellow firefighter is down, hurt, lost and disorented in a smoke filled burning building. Is your FAST/RIT team ready to face this tramatic,potentially deadly ,scenario? As the words "Mayday,Mayday,Madyay" interrupt what some may consider "just another routine fire call", is your department really trained, really ready? How about the Mutual Aid department from up the street that may be there as your FAST/RIT team or visa versa???
I would love to hear what others are doing to train for this scenario,,,ideas,staffing,policies,stories,ect.
Ok everyone. Let's get this thing rolling. Once there are a few more posts I'll contribute. As with everything else in Fire/Ems, I created this group to gain information as well as give. This is here as another tool to help us all do our jobs better and more efficiently by learning from each other. Don't be shy, write something up.
I am a capt with a small dept and we actually do practice this - we currently have 20 acive interiors and we just had some training last month in a warehouse and practiced maydays. it started off as a firefighter called for a mayday because he was lost then as the RIT team went to look for them, they also called in a mayday requesting the second team to come in because they had debrie that fell on them with some serious injuries. It was me and my partner who is fairly new to the fire service to go in after them, Our sop states we take a rope bag and spare Tank with us, well half way to the first team we got a call that one of the first team members was out of air, the warehouse was so big that once we got to them I was out of air good thing for that second bottle, long story short we practice every month for FAST/RIT Calls and things that could happen.
I also Suggest to check with your local school and factories and ask if you could use there place to host some inhouse trainings.
We got some of the ideas from firefighterclosecalls.com
I included a ziped PDF file for all to view
Also have a copy of my depts SOP on file in your interested in looking at it
In my dept we tray to train with local dept we built a wire simulator and a denver drill prop also we use 2 or 3 smoke machines when ever we have a house to use.