by Ed Comeau

The following article appeared in the March/April, 2000,  issue of NFPA Journal.
©2000 NFPA Journal. Used with permission

Technical Rescue has come a long way since its origins, and today it's a mainstay in the fire and rescue services.

Fire departments have a long history of doing whatever is necessary to rescue people in danger, be it from a fire or a collapsed building. For years, technical rescue has answered these needs, but it wasn’t often identified as a separate specialty.

As long ago as 1915, for example, the New York City Fire Department formed a special rescue company in response to the construction of the first large commercial refrigeration units that used ammonia. Because ammonia posed a danger to firefighters, the department formed Rescue Company 1 and equipped it with butyl rubber entry suits, according to Battalion Chief Ray Downey, chief of special operations for the New York Fire Department (FDNY) and a task force leader for New York Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) Task Force 1. Over the next several decades, things moved slowly. When Mike McGroarty, chief of the La Habra Fire Department in California, first became involved in technical rescue in the 1970s, the state was still teaching a heavy rescue course based on 1950s civil defense skills at a “disaster city” in the hills above the famous Hollywood sign.

In the 1980s, however, things began to change. In 1985, a group of rescuers from California acted on a request from the Mexican government and responded to a devastating earthquake in Mexico City. At the time, there were no organized teams to respond to such requests, so the group was assembled from various departments throughout California. During the return trip, team members discussed what should be done in California, based on what they’d seen in Mexico City. The result of that discussion was an organization called USAR, Inc., which served as a mechanism for coordinating US&R activity in California and provided much of the leadership and coordination that moved technical rescue forward in California during the decade.

Two years later, Mike McGroarty and several other instructors developed a course called Rescue Systems I to teach fire service personnel how to stabilize collapsed buildings and rescue trapped victims using materials that would be available following a widespread disaster, such as a major earthquake. When an earthquake devastated what was then Soviet Armenia later that year, McGroarty traveled to Armenia as part of a team formed by the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC) to study rescue operations and see what lessons could be brought back to the United States. In 1989, another earthquake and a hurricane marked the turning point for technical rescue and US&R in the United States. The first to hit was Hurricane Hugo, which slammed into the east coast on September 21, causing $9 billion in damage. Then came the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco, which measured 7.1 on the Richter Scale, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) couldn’t provide coordinated and effective rescue teams. Although California had started developing the US&R Task Force program, there was nothing comparable on a federal level. To begin remedying that situation, FEMA held a meeting in Seattle in 1991 that brought together experts from around the country for a brainstorming session. The participants evaluated California’s task force system, which, after some modification, became the model for the national US&R system. Various working groups were also created to evaluate the criteria necessary for various rescue roles and determine the equipment needed to outfit a complete task force.

The US&R program

Since 1991, the US&R program has grown to 27 teams across the country, all capable of responding within six hours to any natural or manmade disaster anywhere in the United States. The teams, which are designed to be completely self-sufficient, are equipped with a standardized cache of equipment, ranging from bottled water to the latest high-tech listening devices for locating trapped victims. They also bring in such items as tents, sleeping bags, water, and food so that they don’t place an additional burden on local resources that may already be stretched by disaster.

The program’s objective is to place a well-trained and equipped team at the disposal of the local incident commander to help extricate trapped victims and to augment, not replace, existing resources. The US&R team leader is under the direction of the local incident commander, with the team serving as another resource. Each task force, staffed by 62 specialists, is divided into four separate branches—search, rescue, medical, and technical—composed of well-trained personnel equipped to operate independently if necessary. The task forces are structured so that they can operate in 12-hour shifts, around the clock.

The US&R program serves to standardize technical rescue across the country, making the disciplines associated with technical rescue more consistent and dramatically improving the procedures and equipment rescuers use. In 1992, for example, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers developed a structures specialist program to train civil engineers in emergency shoring and stabilization techniques. The course, which has graduated a number of engineers who have used their skills on major incidents such as the Oklahoma City bombing, is the only one of its kind in the world that prepares civilian engineers to operate under emergency situations.

Another factor in the standardization of technical rescue is NFPA 1670, Operations and Training for Technical Rescue Incidents. This document, developed over the years by a cross-section of recognized experts in the field, outlines the levels of operational capability for a number of the skills needed by technical rescuers. NFPA 1670 also discusses incident management and responder safety, and its appendix contains a wealth of reference information on structural collapse, confined space, and other areas. As the field grows, the equipment used to support it has also evolved. For example, the Corps of Engineers developed a listening device that allows an operator to listen for sounds of victims in the rubble, then zero in on the probable location. In a further refinement, a firefighter developed a probe, mounted with a television camera and a combination microphone/speaker, that can be inserted into debris so an operator can inspect an area and speak with any victims. 

Tech rescue skills

Today, the ever-changing risks to which departments respond continue to change in rescue companies. Sewers create underground confined space dangers; high-rise buildings create high-angle rescue problems; the rivers make water rescue and dive teams a necessity; and extensive construction and demolition make it imperative that the fire department handle structural collapses. Any good technical rescue team needs to be able to pull myriad skills, tools, and abilities out of its “toolbox” when faced with an unpredictable situation. Take rope rescue, for example. Until recently, rope rescue was thought to be something used only in wilderness settings, when rescuing someone from the side of a mountain. However, rope skills are the core of most other technical rescue disciplines, such as confined space, building collapse, and trench rescue.

There are two basic objectives of rope rescue operations. The first is to reach the victim safely, whether he or she is an injured rock climber, a window washer stranded on the side of a 20-story building, or an injured worker inside a tank. The second objective is to get the person back to safety without inflicting further injury. Both objectives can require the rescue team to build sophisticated lowering and hauling systems using a variety of anchors, pulleys, and ropes. And to accomplish these evolutions safely, you need a team of people behind the scene working in concert.

Another hazardous operation is the rescue of a victim trapped in a collapsed trench. Trenches can collapse very easily, and soil is so heavy that even someone buried up to their knees can be completely immobilized. One cubic foot (.03 cubic meters) of soil weighs 100 pounds (45 kilograms), which is enough to compress a victim’s chest and stop him or her from breathing. All of this soil has to be removed by hand to avoid injuring or killing the trapped victim. There have been cases where well-intentioned rescuers tried to remove the soil with a back-hoe, and wound up accidentally killing the victims.

Before entering a collapsed trench, rescuers must install emergency shoring to ensure that another collapse doesn’t occur. Shoring up a collapsed trench quickly is difficult, and the design and installation of a working shoring system can require ingenuity. Today, there are engineered shoring systems that can be installed relatively quickly. They may be composed of manufactured equipment, such as pneumatic or air shores, or they can use materials such as 4- by 4-inch (10- by 10-centimeter) timbers combined with sheets of Finn form to create a safe “box” from within which rescuers can work. Manufactured systems will not always work during a rescue, however, because they’re generally designed to hold up soil that’s vertical. In a collapse, the sides of a trench are often sloped or irregularly shaped, requiring some ingenuity on the rescuer’s part to develop an effective shoring system.

Like soil, moving water can do a lot of damage to the human body. Moving water has a lot of power behind it, and people often don’t realize how dangerous it can be. A quiet brook can become a raging torrent after a storm, and dry washes can become fast-moving rivers within minutes after a monsoon. Cars trying to drive through running water have been known to be swept downstream until they’re pinned against another object.

Entering swiftly moving water isn’t something an untrained rescuer should attempt. As with all other technical rescue, a team of trained rescuers must work together to rescue victims, using a “throw-row-go” philosophy. Rescuers should first try to throw a rescue rope to the victim and pull him or her to shore. If this isn’t possible, the next option is to row out to the victim in a boat. Should that fail, the final option is to enter the water. This risky operation requires a team of rescuers to support the personnel in the water.

Building collapse and confined space rescue As with most other areas of technical rescue, the discipline of rescuing people from collapsed buildings has become more sophisticated over the years. This was spurred, in part, by a series of studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta to learn more about why people die when they’re trapped in buildings after earthquakes. CDC learned that there’s often a window of opportunity during which a successful rescue is possible and that outside this window, the chances of survival diminish dramatically. Following the Mexico City earthquake in 1987 and the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, a more concerted effort was made to develop the specific skills needed to locate and extricate trapped people. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the California Office of Emergency Services have been leaders in developing this area of expertise and delivering training programs to engineers across the country. As a result, significant strides have been made in this discipline.

Strides have also been made in confined space rescue. According to OSHA, a confined space is a space that’s “large enough and configured so that an employee can bodily enter and perform assigned work; and has limited or restricted means for entry or exit (For example, tanks, vessels, silos, storage bins, hoppers, vaults, and pits are spaces that may have limited means of entry.); and is not designed for continuous employee occupancy.”

Confined spaces are dangerous, not because they can collapse, but because they may contain combustible or explosive gases, or they may not contain enough oxygen to sustain life. In addition, confined spaces are often difficult to move around in. All of these factors can combine to create a challenging rescue scenario.

Over the past 10 years, technical rescue has become an integral part of many fire departments, hundreds of which are forming special operations divisions in response to the demands of the communities they serve. Fire departments are also becoming more adept at conducting risk analyses in their communities, which help them determine the services they need to provide. Just as emergency medical services did in the past, technical rescue has become a mainstay in the fire and rescue services.

Ed Comeau is the principal writer for writer-tech.com, a technical writing firm. He was the chief fire investigator for the NFPA and a fire protection engineer for the Phoenix Fire Department’s Special Operations Section where he developed technical rescue training programs for the department and its US&R task force.