Earlier this month, the AllMetal Recycling facility in north Wichita was visited by a steady parade of fire trucks and apparatus. There were no lights and sirens. What brought more than 140 Sedgwick County firefighters to the lot wasn’t an emergency, it was an opportunity to learn.
For six days, AllMetal Recycling served as a training ground for the Sedgwick County Fire District. The recycling center provided the space — and more importantly — dozens of vehicles to build life-sized training scenarios.
It’s a training opportunity that came at just the right time, the district’s training officer Captain Matt Nance said.
Firefighters can expect to get a call for a motor vehicle accident daily, but Nance said the “high impact, bigger vehicle motor vehicle accidents, I would probably say [we get] one or two a month — and that will go up during the summer.”
Between Memorial Day and Labor Day the district sees an uptick in the number of fatal and injury accidents. That increase is brought on by a wave of young drivers navigating the roads during summer break. A second wave comes in mid- to late-summer when the county’s rural roadways see an influx of trucks and tractors with the wheat harvest.
During the recent training, several squads worked through an underride simulation where the front of a Toyota Camry was sandwiched under the tilted and bent rear of a trailer.
The simulation gave the firefighters the opportunity to work with Res-Q-Jacks, lifting and stabilization struts that allow the fire crews to replace the wooden crib blocks they’d typically use to raise the trailer off the Camry. Sedgwick County currently has two of the $5,000 jacks — split between north county and south county.
Nance said the additional hands-on time with the equipment was beneficial enough for the training, but the true focus of the exercise wasn’t about interacting with all the metal and steel of the scene, it was about the patient.
Justin Best is a firefighter-paramedic with Station 33. He said that for all cars and trucks on the scene, “everything we got going on this week is caring for the pinned patient.”
“It all is a medical call, just with issues getting to a patient,” Best said.
Best’s role in the training was making sure that the firefighters were well versed on MARCH. It’s an acronym developed by the United States military to guide trauma response.
The acronym teaches first responders to look for and treat any M, massive hemorrhaging; A, airway issues; to assess R, respirations; and C, circulation; and then check for H, head injuries or hypothermia.
MARCH is a newer emphasis of the department. Best and Nance said when they first joined the department they were trained on the ABCs — another mnemonic to remind first responders to check a patient’s airways, breathing and circulation.
Firefighters often put the ABCs in action when they went to stabilize a patient’s head and neck. Best said once firefighters opened up enough space in the vehicle, one of the firefighters would get behind any patient “and then that guy just led the good life in the back seat with his hands on somebody’s head.”
“We're not getting away from ABCs,” Best told firefighters during the training. “We are adding to it.”
Quick responses to injuries like hemorrhages are especially important as firefighters try to get patients to care within a “golden hour,” that’s the 60 minutes following an accident or trauma in which patients have the best chance of survival with hospital care.
For all the high stakes firefighters are juggling during a real response, the training scenarios offer a bit of adrenaline without the worry. Or as Lieutenant Nathan Helten said training is “fun, it’s fun stuff. I enjoy this stuff.”
Helten is part of the county’s technical rescue response team — a squad of veteran firefighters who are trained to respond to specialized trauma situations. The underride scenario is their bread and butter.
“If they have two or three vehicles involved, that's when it starts getting really complicated and you got a lot more safety issues involved,” Helten said. “But one car and one semi trailer, that's not that big a deal.”
For as often as firefighters may get called to scenes like this one, finding a way to practice the response in a realistic way, is more rare. AllMetal donated more than 40 cars and three tractor-trailers for the week of simulations. Nance said this may be the only opportunity the district has to train in this way without planning a once-a-year visit to a facility in Salina called Crisis City or to a special conference.
“To have this happening in your backyard, and not have to drive two hours away, is not only cost-effective, but it's way more convenient,” Nance said. “That's what makes this probably more special — it’s right here.”
