Near Miss: Firefighter Falls Using Escape Rope
This week's Near Miss deals with a live fire exercise and the use of an escape rope.
A firefighter with approximately ten years of experience was practicing a firefighter safety & survival technique under live smoke and heat conditions during a training exercise at the county fire academy. The technique was the firefighter bailout. The technique requires placing a haligan tool in the corner of a window and attaching a life rope to the haligan and his personal (brand name deleted) life belt. The firefighter then performs a controlled descent to escape a hostile fire room via the window to the ground. As the firefighter began his descent out of the window, he failed to place his right hand into the braking position. He went out the window with an uncontrolled rate of descent and crashed into the airbag. Fortunately, the firefighter escaped without injury. The firefighter could have sustained life threatening or career ending injuries if the air bag had not been in place.
Two things grabbed my attention from this report. First, I have never seen this exercise done with an airbag as a safety device. Not a bad idea. Second, instead of an airbag, the use of a safety line and belay man were used in case the participant started to fall.
Read the Lessons Learned section of this report to see what this department did to mitigate the safety issues of this exercise in the future.
I've got a question for the readers: Is the use of a haligan propped in the corner of the window the usual method of anchoring the safety line or are there other options that are taught?
Posted March 23, 2006 09:46 AM ·
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Near Misses
