Thursday, March 24 was the fourth full day of Spring, but a Winter Weather Advisory was in effect. It was cold and wet, and at Miles River Sand and Gravel in Ipswich, very muddy. “Perfect”, in the words of Ipswich Fire Deputy Chief Lee Prentiss.
Ipswich Fire was hosting more than two dozen firefighters at Miles River for a trench rescue drill. A 180-pound dummy lay at the bottom of a nearly ten-foot-deep trench dug out by Miles River Sand and Gravel, simulating a victim who had fallen in when the edge collapsed, with some debris on top of them. Rescues like these present a number of significant dangers for both victims and rescuers, and need to be approached cautiously and with specialized equipment. That’s where the Massachusetts Northeast Technical Rescue Team comes in.
“The Technical Rescue Team specializes in low-frequency, high-risk rescues,” Deputy Chief Prentiss explains. “These are natural or man-made disasters that don’t happen very often, but when they do, the dangers are very high.” The nearly 100 members of the Team, members of some 16 area fire departments, train for wide area searches and rope, confined space, structural collapse and trench rescues. Ipswich has four Department members on the team: Deputy Prentiss, Lieutenants Brett Emerson and James McInnis, and Firefighter Matthew Lemire. Ipswich, along with the North Reading and Peabody Fire Departments, also hosts a Northeast Massachusetts Technical Rescue Squad Truck that holds the specialized equipment crucial to any of these emergencies.
“Local departments don’t possess the equipment and enough specially-trained personnel for something like this,” says North Reading Fire Captain Eric Pepper, who oversaw the training. “So we need to pull resources. Part of the training is getting all of these agencies used to working together under a unified command.”
Following an initial response by a group of Ipswich firefighters who are not members of the Technical Rescue Team but participated in the training, members of the Team and their trucks were gradually added to the operation to simulate a real-world event. Many of these same Team members had in fact worked on a real trench rescue operation in Ipswich, back in 2013. It took just under three hours of careful shoring up of the muddy trench so that the “victim” could be reached, medically tended to, and extracted.
And as for the weather? “You have to practice like you play,” says Deputy Prentiss. “These incidents can happen any day under any circumstances. Today was a fantastic day for training.”
*Thanks to Miles River Sand and Gravel for once again hosting the Northeast Massachusetts Technical Rescue Team. And thanks to our partners from the Amesbury, Andover, Beverly, Burlington, Danvers, Georgetown, Gloucester, Haverhill, Lynn, Melrose, Newburyport, Peabody, North Reading, Saugus and Wakefield Fire Deparments.