Blanket Carry, Dark Room Search, Victim Extraction

This is the tree outside my apartment. It looked like this for one day, two at most. Behind it is the house that used to be short and unobtrusive and then was raised so that if anyone ever moves into it, they'll be able to look right into my windows.

Great NERT class Monday night covering search and rescue. We heard a lecture and saw slides in the first half, and in the second half we got to practice carrying a person using a blanket, doing a team search of a dark room, and extracting a person from underneath something heavy.

Here’s how you carry a person using a blanket: Roll two of the edges in until the blanket is about the width of a person. Turn the blanket over so the rolled part is underneath. Place the person on his back, roll him to one side, push the blanket as far under him as possible, lay him back down, roll him the other way and adjust the blanket. Then, if you have enough people, it’s easy enough to carry the person. It’s good to have someone support his head.

Here’s how you do a team search of a dark room: If going counterclockwise, the leader puts her right hand on the wall and feels her way along. (If going clockwise, use left hand.) The other members of the team also feel along the wall with their right hands, and hang onto the shoulder of the person in front of them with their left hands. Any team member should announce any topographical feature of interest, such as anything sticking out of the wall or things people might hit their heads on. Test the integrity of the floor before stepping forward.

If you have some sort of a light source, even just a cell phone, that can help keep the leader from sticking her hand into a nest of live wires. To search the center of the room, the team can form a chain, holding hands and maintaining contact with the wall at one end of the chain. If you smell gas, leave the area, going back the way you came, like a millipede reversing direction.

The fireman giving the lecture said to consider the type of building and the time of day. If it’s a residence and it’s 3 p.m., most people might be out at work. If it’s a church and it’s Sunday, it might be full of people. He said if a sewing class is taking place, then you know there will be lots of “young guys” in the room. That was a nice touch.

Here’s how you extract someone from underneath something heavy: First you assess the general situation for hazards: Is a nearby wall about to collapse? It was pointed out that a brick building was once a pile of bricks and that’s what it wants to be again. Is there a smell of gas? Are there live wires?

Designate a leader, a safety person (to continually assess the overall situation), and a medical person. Next, build a crib. This is an improvised structure that fills in the open space next to the person. That way, if things shift, the heavy thing will rest on the crib rather than flattening the person.

Several identical two-by-fours make a lovely crib, but you will often have to improvise. You might use a car jack or put car tires in the open space. If you did happen to have several two-by-fours, you would place two of them parallel to each other leaving a space in between, and then place two others crosswise at the outer edges of the first two-by-fours, and then place two more in the original direction, so you build a box. A crib that collapses due to poor design or sloppy construction is not very helpful.

To avoid having your fingers mashed or cut off, don’t stick your hands under the heavy thing you’re trying to get the person out from under. Push your cribbing material underneath it with some other object.

Then find a long thing (a lever) and a fulcrum (the thing the lever rests on). Put the fulcrum near the heavy thing you need to raise, put the lever over the fulcrum, push down on the far end of the lever, and raise the heavy thing a wee bit. You don’t have to raise it far, just enough to drag the person out. However, as soon as you gain a bit more space, fill it in by making your crib higher. The crib can then do the work of keeping the heavy thing raised while you concentrate on the person. Have your medical person assess the victim for breathing, bleeding and shock, as in triage.

Besides being very instructive, these were good team-building exercises, and occasioned the most conversation among class members to date. After the class ends, you can join a neighborhood NERT team, if you want, and do drills now and then.

I walked partway home along Valencia St. with a woman from the class.

As Tom observed, Valencia St. seems to be more populated with panhandlers lately. It seems a bit seedier. Of course, it was extremely seedy 20 years ago, but the dot-com boom swept all of those elements out. Now they are returning.