Swiftwater Rescue Update
Part 3
This issue’s edition of Swiftwater Rescue Update opens up on a tragic note. Last August, Denver Firefighter Robert Crump lost his life while responding to a flash flood that had hit the Denver area resulting in massive street flooding. See article at www.firehouse.com.
Noted swiftwater rescue author and instructor Slim Ray states that we lose, on average, three professional rescuers a year to swiftwater incidents. This figure may actually be a little low or not be telling the entire story.
According to a recent post in the SwiftH2O-News@egroups.com, Jim Segerstrom, one of the creators of the Swiftwater Rescue Technician training programs and a founding member of Rescue 3 International and the Special Rescue Services Group, SRS, states that he and a number of other swiftwater rescue instructors have been maintaining informal but accurate statistics on swiftwater rescuer deaths for a number of years. According to his figures, rescuer drownings, in line-of-duty situations, average between 8 and 11 a year for all responders — fire, police, EMS and others. This includes training accidents as well as actual calls.
According to the National Fire Administration, there were approximately 150 line-of-duty deaths of firefighters in 1999. If you were to compare the number of deaths in fire per thousand working fires to the number of deaths by drowning at flood calls, it becomes apparent that it is far more dangerous for a firefighter to respond to a water call than a fire call.
The difference for this, according to Jim Segerstrom, is that most firefighters posses the training and equipment required for fire-suppression activities and they generally use them while “battling the red devil.” However, firefighters do not have the training or equipment for a water call, and they tend to let their emotions run their response for flood and swiftwater events.
This is supported by a very broad U.S. Coast Guard statistic. Two-thirds of all drownings occur to people who had no intention of entering the water. This certainly holds true for the case of Firefighter Robert Crump.
Firefighter Crump and his partner were not engaged in any rescue activities when they observed a female motorist stranded in swift-moving water. When the firefighters, wearing their bunker gear, stepped into the water to assist the motorist, they were both swept off of their feet. Firefighter Crump’s partner and the motorist were eventually saved, but Crump himself was swept into a storm drain before anyone could come to his aid.
It has long been a tenet of the swiftwater rescue community that many firefighters are their own worst enemy by wearing turnout/bunker gear around moving water. While it is true that you can float in still water wearing a complete set of turnouts, such as falling into a swimming pool or a flooded basement on a fire scene, this same principal does not hold true in moving water.
Indeed, turnout boots and bunker pants act much like a sea anchor, filling with water and dragging their wearer along. Even the traditional fire helmet turns deadly in moving water, due to both its weight and the bill on the back of the helmet. The bill catches water resulting in either hyperextension of the wearers head if they’re floating downstream head first. In what is more often the case, when the wearer is floating feet first, the bill flexes the wearer’s head forward, contributing to occluding the wearer’s airway.
These are just some personal safety points to remember so that you and your brother and sister rescuers return home from your next swiftwater/flood rescue incident.
Flooding is very much in the world news the past several months. Unusually strong rain patterns across the southern United States, Europe and Asia have resulted in almost unprecedented flood emergencies, mudslides and snow avalanches around the world. The cause of these lethal weather patterns can be summed up in two words, El Niño.
El Niño is a recurring disruptive weather pattern that occurs every two to seven years and results in the periodic warming of parts of the Pacific Ocean. This, in turn, changes the patterns of the wind and moisture overhead, resulting in severe weather around the world. It has been blamed for thousands of deaths in storms, heat waves, fires, floods, frost and drought, and for causing $32 billion in property damage.
A report was presented at the United Nations last October entitled, “Lessons Learned from the 1997-98 El Niño: Once Burned, Twice Shy?”. The report calls for the development of regional organizations so that countries can work together in preparing for El Niño. Other recommendations include involving top government leaders early in disaster planning; mapping the world's most vulnerable populations; improving forecasting; educating local decision-makers on how best to use El Niño forecasts, and developing a scientific establishment within each country to use research from other nations.
While this all may sound dry and most of us are about sick to death of hearing about El Niño and La Niña, we can’t ignore the effects it is having on the communities we serve. This UN report is brief, straight to the point and makes for some interesting reading. Well worth checking out.
An even more interesting and speculative report/predition on coastal flooding along the entire U.S. seaboard can be found in a recent BBC article. Essentially, British scientist Simon Day states that one flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma, in the Canaries archipelago, is unstable and could plunge into the ocean. The resultant massive displacement of water could unleash a giant wave of water that would swamp the Caribbean and much of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. The article goes on to say that this is just a hypothetical scenario but one that must be taken seriously none the less.
In my last column, I mentioned that flood waters are far from pristine and that they are indeed usually highly contaminated with all sorts of chemical and biological wastes. This has been a long-recognized problem in the swiftwater rescue community. Indeed, it has proved to be such a health problem/risk that the Los Angeles Fire Department, as part of the L.A. Swiftwater Rescue Task Force, routinely tests the water any time one of its members is exposed to it during storms. This is because almost every member of its swiftwater rescue program has ended up with one problem or another, from skin infections and rashes to worse.
Continuing along these lines, an October 10, 2000, New York Times article entitled “Deadly Infection Re-emerges as People Get Adventurous,” by Alicia Ault, shares the story of Dr. Nicole MacLaren who fell into the water while on a Costa Rican whitewater rafting trip and contracted leptospirosis, a bacterial disease that is near fatal if left untreated.
Leptospirosis is not easily recognized by doctors, even though it has long been seen as a scourge in developing nations. People become infected with the bacteria by swallowing contaminated water or by getting it in their eyes or in open cuts.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently confirmed a leptospirosis outbreak in 30 American athletes in the Eco-Challenge Expedition Race who likely became ill by swimming and canoeing in the flooded Segama River, which runs through a dense rain forest in Malaysian Borneo. No racers died, but at least 12 were hospitalized, and the CDC urged them all to be treated.
A similar outbreak occurred in the United States in 1998, when 110 of 775 triathletes contracted leptospirosis after swimming in Lake Springfield in Illinois. In 1996, a research study proved that three inner-city Baltimore residents with unexplained flu-like illnesses had leptospirosis, contracted by walking barefoot through Baltimore City alleys.
The article goes into the problem of leptospirosis in much greater detail, but the point is this: We have to be more careful about how we as rescuers look at entering contaminated water. Our chiefs and emergency managers need to take a much more proactive approach on recognizing and mitigating the problems that rescuers will be encountering on an increasingly more frequent basis in flood and swiftwater rescue events.
So what is the best way to be prepared for a swiftwater incident in your jurisdiction? To size up your risk potential, actively plan on how to deal with it and then put that plan into action by funding and training your department or team. Battalion Chief Tim Rogers of the Charlotte (N.C.) Fire Department suggests that the better approach for any agency who may respond to a flood/swiftwater emergency is to avoid training and equipping a “team” (usually some small group that will be absorbed in one call) and to train and equip the whole, that is, every one in any agency who may respond to or play a role in this type of emergency. Flood/swiftwater events are, by their very nature, multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional (geographically large), haz-mat, long-term public-health events.
Chief Rogers goes on to point out that the biggest failure that he has observed regarding all of this is not that cities and so forth have not trained and equipped responders. The biggest failure is that cities and so forth have not started and/or completed a hazard assessment regarding their flood/swiftwater problems. Some agencies have trained and equipped personnel and don't really know why. Others say they won't do it because they have no problem, when historically they do. The hazard assessment points the way. One example of this is flooding in urban areas which involve both above- and below-grade stormwater management systems that require urban mapping and indication of such systems. (The loss of our brother rescuer, Firefighter Robert Crump, is a prime example of the necessity of this.)
Towards that end there are a number of useful resources.
James M. Chinn authored an article entitled “Are You Ready for Floods: Agencies Must Preplan For Dynamic Water Incidents” that appeared in the March/April 1999 issue of Advanced Rescue Technology magazine. Slim Ray also wrote an article entitled “Flood as a Weapon of Mass Destruction” that appeared in the October/November 2000 issue of ART magazine. For a copies of this and all of Slim’s articles on swiftwater and flood rescue that have appeared in various rescue, fire and EMS journals, visit his website.
Also, of interest for EMS types is an interactive Near Drowning Case Scenario written by Respiratory Tech Lori A. Weber-Hardy of the School of Health Related Professions and School of Medicine at the University of Missouri, Columbia. (Quite a mouthful.)
The bullet. According to Ms. Weber-Hardy, the purpose of her Near Drowning Case Scenario is to test the knowledge and to build confidence in the advanced respiratory care practitioner's ability to critically think and perform in the care of a pediatric near-drowning patient. The case is written for pediatric intensive care workers and takes place in an emergency department (ED) and a pediatric intensive care unit.
Finally, a reminder that the World Congress on Drowning 2002 is still on track. Slim Ray is one of the contributors to the Rescue Task Force, and his paper is now posted on the website in the Rescue Task Force area.
That’s it for this issue of Swiftwater Rescue Update. Stay safe, everyone.
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