Boat Rescue
The usually lively Cameron Municipal Pool hosted a much different spectacle last Wednesday as part of a mutual training event involving the Cameron Fire Department and Cameron EMS.
Throughout the night firefighters and paramedics worked together as part of a joint operation training for deep-water rescues.
“We’re always susceptible to any kind of call at any time. As a fire department, we try to carry the equipment and have as much equipment as we need and as good equipment as we can have on our vehicles before any incidents that might happen,” Cameron FD Chief Mike O’Donnell said. “You never know when that could happen at the reservoir or the swimming pool.
We’ve had incidents in the state park and you have farm ponds. There is a lot of that stuff around and you never know when that might happen.”
The joint training was two weeks removed from a similar joint-training event involving local lifeguards, who worked with Cameron EMS to train for worst-case-scenario incidents focusing on neck injuries and patient handoff to awaiting paramedics. Last week’s joint-training involving the CEMS and CFD had similar emphasis, but with the heightened danger of a deep-water rescue. One group trained to dive for deep-water extrications while wearing a life-vest, others rowed a portable dingy surnamed ‘Fortuna’ to pluck out faux injured or unconscious swimmers.
“We also have to think about winter time, when the ice that’s not frozen solid enough to hold individuals up and they fall through,” O’Donnell said. “You have to be looking at that. We only have a small amount of time to train like this during the summer, but throughout the year we talk about it in different training sessions. Even if we’re training for a structure fire, we may relay it back to what we did here.”
One component to the joint-training was the participating victims. Christian Virts, a training officer for CEMS and the CFD said he sought the most realistic portrayal of a drowning victim – often flailing against his rescuer or letting his arms and legs go limp and act as dead weight in order to simulate an unconscious victim.
“If there is somebody walking around in the water in pain, but alert and oriented they may be more apt to have a spinal injury,” Virts said. “If you have someone face-down in the water, you’re going to take a different approach. We try to train for many different scenarios. When We get so focused on one thing, which is called tunnel vision, and we approach each scene that way. That is not the correct way. By getting away from that, we preach training for different scenarios and that gets us out of that tunnel vision.”
