Rescue training can be nervous work

Thursday, April 8, 2004 | 9:47 a.m.

Clark County firefighters rescued a motorist trapped by floodwaters underneath Imperial Palace's parking garage.

A Clark County Fire Department heavy rescue crew plucked an injured worker from 600 feet atop the Wynn Las Vegas resort under construction.

The heavy rescue team lowered another construction worker from atop the Bellagio's expansion project.

A man was freed by the heavy rescue team from a rock crusher in a quarry on Sloan Road.

Numerous motorists and a Las Vegas Fire & Rescue crew were rescued from floodwaters in the northwest Las Vegas Valley.

A Clark County heavy rescue crew pulled a man out of a mine shaft southwest of the valley.

As rescuers in the training exercise began to dangle above the hole preparing to enter, siding placed along the trench walls fell in and part of the trench began to collapse.

The resulting hourlong delay underscored the challenges the fire department's elite team of rescuers face in their daily work.

The heavy rescue teams are the ones called upon to pluck people from the tops of cars surrounded by swirling floodwaters and from the tops of 600-foot tall buildings, among other precarious situations.

The 30 firefighters assigned to the Clark County Fire Department's heavy rescue team receive specialized training, including training such as Wednesday's exercise, to keep their skills sharp, Deputy Chief Richard Wiseman said. They are on duty around the clock, with 10 firefighters on each shift, spokesman Bob Leinbach said.

Clark County's rescue squad is also one of 28 qualified by the Federal Emergency Management Administration that can go anywhere in the United States, Leinbach said.

In addition to trained firefighters, the rescue team can include paramedics, structural engineers and search dogs trained by Metro Police, Leinbach said.

"It's not so much what disaster it is, as it is where people are trapped," Leinbach said. "And they are ready to go at all times."

Most recently members of the Heavy Rescue Team have been the stars of dramatic television footage as they were lowered via cranes from the upper floors of resort towers under construction along the Strip. They ride down with patients strapped into rescue baskets.

During the monsoon season, they are lowered from helicopters to pull flood victims up to safety.

But while those are probably the highest profile types of work the team does, they train for as many scenarios as are possible, and on Wednesday it was yet another new one.

South of Blue Diamond Road, members of the team practiced rescuing people from a 30-foot deep trench.

There are two or three trench rescues a year in Clark County. A construction worker either falls into a hole on a building site, or is buried when soil sides collapse, Clark County Fire Capt. Ed Beaman said.

As construction sites continue to pop up throughout Southern Nevada, Beaman and his fellow rescuers are concerned that people on dirt bikes or hiking the desert on weekends might fall into one of the unmarked trenches. And during the week there is always the risk that a construction worker will be trapped in a trench.

Wednesday's trench was deeper than Beaman and most of the other firefighters had ever had to deal with, however.

Beaman and 20 other firefighters from Las Vegas and Clark County fire departments practiced their skills in tying knots, laying lines and safely retrieving fellow firefighters.

Beaman, 48, trained and joined the 13-year-old heavy rescue squad of the Clark County Fire Department after completing four months of extra training. Then there are monthly drills like Wednesday's, where firefighters hone their skills over and over again.

Rescue work is painstaking. The work moves slowly as firefighters stretch and knot and secure their lines.

Each line lowering the rescuer into the trench is held tight by another firefighter. They move ropes of green and red and blue by the inch. Each pulley that feeds the lines into the hole has been checked and double checked before it is attached.

Rescue crews work in a cohesive unit, "and safety is No. 1," said Capt. John Grana, 44, a native Las Vegan who has been with the Clark County Fire Department for nearly 14 years, 13 of those with the heavy rescue squad.

The most dangerous part of trench rescues involves ensuring the walls do not collapse onto the firefighters, Grana said.

"It could take an hour or more than an hour to set up," Grana said. When a victim is buried in a trench, firefighters literally dig him out by hand.

As to why he chose rescue work, Grana said, "Any hour of the day or the night, we do the gamut of everything. It's always something different."