Carolina Fire Rescue EMS Journal Just like with your high quality rescue hardware, you get what you pay for in radios. Do you want to be on a waterfall where you can barely hear yourself think, and not be able to communicate with your top riggers and belayers? Historically, what has been the number one cause of mishaps? A lack of communication. Carrier pigeons, smoke signals, nor hand signals will likely not work too well in settings like this. Fourth lesson:Train, train some more ... and then train again, and keep training on lifesaving technical skills you and your team members will need in real world rescues or recoveries. When possible, train as a group or team, so that each of you knows the others skills, abilities, and yes, limitations. Not to sound melodramatic, but in technical rescue, we will hold each others lives in our hands.This alone, perhaps most importantly, is key to knowing you can trust your fellow rescuers. When the going gets so tough that you wonder why you’re even there, when you cannot see the other team members, or barely hear them, but the rescue must go on, it is THEN that you know all will be OK.They have your back. Can there be anything more meaningful to a rescuer? Fifth lesson: Remember why you are there as a rescuer. Ninety-eight percent of society isn’t there, so why are we? Because deep down inside, we know that we must “be there.” It is a calling only a rescuer can understand. It is hard to put into words, because words cannot describe it. Rescue has been described as “safe removal of a victim from a place of great peril to a place of safety.”Yes, this is rescue, but why us? Each rescuer, in his or her own way, has to find this out for themselves. We know why we are rescuers; the public will never know, but does that really matter? While this article deals with waterfall settings, and with a recent recovery in a very dangerous situation, it is the “rescue reminders” that are important. Participating in any kind of difficult or exceptionally dangerous rescue reminds us of how very easily life can be lost. It should remind us that our training must be paramount to being able to accomplish these rescues. Our gear must be the “right stuff” to make the rescue happen. We must know that we can trust this rescue gear when utilized correctly. Perhaps most important, though, is knowing we can trust our skills and ourselves, and that our team members will “have us covered.”
Bob Twomey is the current chief and founder of the North Carolina High Level Extraction Rescue Team, Inc., a volunteer helicopter search and rescue support team
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Large waterfall with seemingly benign level top, but a slip here will likely be fatal.
based in Transylvania county, N.C. He is the senior helicopter pilot for Wolf Tree Aviation,
LLC operating out of Transylvania Community Airport. He also serves as Deputy Chief for Train-
ing in Brevard Rescue Squad. He has been active in SAR for 37 years. Twomey can be reached
at 828-884-7174 or btwomey@ citcom.net