Another fas­ci­nat­ing demon­stra­tion at the Writ­ers Police Acad­emy was watch­ing a team of fire­fight­ers “res­cue” an imag­i­nary patient trapped in the back of a vehi­cle. For safety rea­sons, they wouldn’t let any of us vol­un­teer!
In a real-life sit­u­a­tion, the fire­fight­ers would cover the patient with a blan­ket to pro­tect him/her from glass frag­ments. They would also have one fire­fighter inside with him/her, try­ing to keep things calm.

There are a LOT of pre­cau­tions taken, and for the fire­fight­ers, the patient is pri­or­ity #1. One of the first things they deal with is set­ting off the airbags if they haven’t already detonated.

There are heavy-duty explo­sives in there—think rocket fuel, and the last thing the fire­fight­ers want is igni­tion. There are 2 stage airbags; the first goes ‘poof’ and the sec­ond goes ‘bang.’ It’s not always easy to tell which is which, and in our demo, we got the ‘bang’ first. Airbags are high on the list of things to steal—an airbag and actu­a­tor sell for about $800.

Then they’ll sta­bi­lize the car using step chocks, and dis­con­nect the bat­tery before work­ing on the patient. They don’t want any sur­prises. Hybrid cars are very quiet, and the fire­fight­ers must con­firm they’re actu­ally off.

They have tools for break­ing win­dows, and tak­ing out the glass.

They use cut­ters, spread­ers, and rams to dis­as­sem­ble the vehi­cle. Mod­ern met­als are stronger and more brit­tle. The cut­ters don’t really “cut”—they squeeze. If a patient is in the front seat and trapped behind the dash, a ram is used to move the dash up and off the patient. Usu­ally 3 inches is enough.

And here’s some more of the process

(you can see the ram they used to lift the dash in the above shot)

This was a spe­cial one-time-only demo, for obvi­ous reasons!

Tomor­row, my guest is Karla Bran­den­burg who’s talk­ing about research so you can write what you know. She’s been “on loca­tion” for her lat­est book.