OLDS — About 160 firefighters and rescue personnel from as far away as B.C. attended the 2023 Western Canada Advanced Rescue Symposium in Olds to learn how to extract people trapped in all kinds of accidents.
Scenarios included pulling a person out of a dangling vehicle, dealing with a super B truck rollover, saving a person buried in grain and rescuing trapped livestock.
The symposium was held June 22-25 at the fire training centre at the western edge of town.
Firefighter Julien Bourgeois of Leduc County led a session on what he called one of the most common farm accidents – impalement.
Bourgeois told the approximately 12-member group gathered for that session that over his 17-year firefighting career he’s attended many such incidents, as well as other common agricultural mishaps such as getting hands caught in grain augers.
In the impalement scenario, the victim was riding in a pickup truck when it ran over a rod that was thrust up through the vehicle and into the abdomen of the victim (a manikin).
First, Bourgeois stressed, is making sure the scene is safe.
If farm machinery is involved, that means determining the power service and shutting that down.
If a vehicle is involved, that includes using whatever chocks may be available to keep the vehicle from rolling. Bourgeois’ group stacked up big chunks of wood.
When it came time to address the patient, Bourgeois said, “I think we all know that you leave the impalement in place.”
The crowd agreed.
He said the goal is to extricate the victim with the piece impaling them so they can be transported to hospital by ambulance.
It needs to be made as small as feasible for transport, so that in turn often means cutting the impaling object.
“With this, not a lot of it is advanced skills whatsoever, but it’s advanced thinking, if you know what I’m saying,” Bourgeois said.
“There’s a lot of planning that goes into impalement for very little cutting, a lot of patient packaging aspect of things. A lot of decision-making needs to happen.”
Bourgeois warned that hydraulic cutters, often used by firefighters in other scenarios, probably aren’t the best tool in impalement cases.
He recounted an experience he had when an impaled patient was brought to a hospital and surgery had to be done right in the ambulance bay.
Bourgeois said he learned from doctors that hydraulic cutters could crush and thus widen the object at the cutting point, making it harder for it to be pulled out and widening the wounds.
“The issue is that our hospitals and our surgery wards don’t have the equipment to actually cut and deal with the material. They have the tools and the expertise on how to cut the human body,” he said.
“So we came in and we stabilized it and just made a clean cut so that they could actually slide that impalement out.”
During an interview with the Albertan, Bourgeois said he knew from the age of six that he wanted to be a firefighter.
He started out as a paid on-call firefighter but eventually got on with a department full-time.
“Best job in the world,” he said.
