Seven Island firefighters completed a tough state trench rescue course on-Island last week. Over the course of four days, Aquinnah Fire Chief Simon Bollin, Tisbury Lt. Gregory Leland, Tisbury firefighter Justin Lucas, Aquinnah Lt. Gordon Perry, Tisbury Lt. Patrick Rolston, West Tisbury Lt. Brynn Schaffner, and Tisbury Assistant Fire Chief Joseph Tierney mucked and braced their way through trenches off High Point Lane in Vineyard Haven.
The training developed skills not just for rescues in utility and construction trenches, but all sorts of holes people can become trapped in on the Island’s beaches.
Mark McCabe, technical rescue coordinator for the Massachusetts Firefighting Academy and a 23-year veteran of the Braintree Fire Department, led the training. McCabe told The Times that training began Thursday night with classroom work, including overviews of OSHA and NFPA regulations relative to trenches. Friday saw the firefighters employ wooden struts or “shores,” and FinnForm panels to secure a fresh trench. They then repeated the exercise using pneumatic struts. Saturday the students employed 6-inch by 6-inch studs called whalers to form a rescue header.
“The purpose of the whalers is to give them more room to extract a person,” McCabe said.
Next they drilled for a “slough in,” where one side of the trench might have collapsed on somebody. In addition to whalers, firefighters used low-pressure airbags to free a rescue dummy.
Sunday, with sour weather upon them, firefighters trained for the most complex type of rescue — an intersecting trench. In a fresh T trench, they rescued a buried dummy trapped under a pipe.
In all their trench work, the firefighters used hot sticks to check for electricity and four-gas meters to check for carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and explosive gases.
“On a scale of 1 to 10,” McCabe said, the Vineyard firefighters’ work was “probably a 15.” McCabe said they were in the top five fastest at the training that he’s seen in the past decade.
McCabe reserved special praise for Tisbury Fire Chief John Schilling and Tierney, director of the Dukes County Technical Rescue Team, for securing all the requisite permission and permitting well in advance of the training.
“Overall, I think everybody did an outstanding job,” Tierney said.
“I was thrilled with the training,” Chief Schilling said. He lauded “fabulous” cooperation between the firefighter students, and commended the expertise and patience of the instructors.
“They were all about making them succeed,” he said. “I hope it’s skill they never have to use.”
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