| It was a perfect winter day for some vehicle extrication training for our "Truckies in Training" and a taste of things to come for some of our newer red hats. Rescue 501 from the City of Manassas even came to play, since we have the possibility of working hand in hand with them it is good to learn their equipment as well. The plan was simple: Roll the Chevy Avalanche on its side and practice some stabilization, then we flip the truck all the way over on to its roof to practice more stabilization practices and finally to cut. In the essence of being SAFE, our plan was to do a controlled roll, by doing this we could always practice with our highly underused air bags.
A Pickett system was built and placed in the grass on the passenger side of the truck, since we were rolling the truck onto the drivers side. The air bags were placed under the truck and the lifting began, catching our progress with our cribbing towers. All was going well until the truck was leaning to far to the drivers side for our airbags to lift anymore, but the truck still would not roll. The angle was also now to great to capture the progress with our cribbing towers. Truck 511 was positioned on the drivers side of the truck so that we could run a come along from the front bumper of the truck to the "B" post on the passenger side of the truck to continue to capture our lift progress. Without being able to use our air bags we were now left with the decision to use our Res-Q-Jacks to "push" the truck over the rest of the way over. It has now been about 3 hours and while we got some great training with airbags and Res-Q-Jacks the Avalanche was now leading the fight 2-0. Starting to run out of daylight, the decision was made to push the truck over the rest of the way safely using brute strength. Finally the truck was now on its side. We decided that instead of trying to roll the truck all the way over to its roof, we would just practice some stabilization with the truck on its side, and then make our cuts. All of our trainees received good training and no injuries were sustained. |
