Rescue vs. Heavy Rescue

[greapr]

What is the differnece between a rescue vehicle and a heavy rescue vehicle? What equipment would be found on a heavy rescue?

[ADSNWFLD]

Good question. Back in the day when only the big cities had rescue companies, the Office of Civil Defense had a number of rescue courses and in those classes they defined the equipment and vehicles that made up Light, Medium, and Heavy Rescue vehicles and teams. As far as the vehicles went it was GVWR that made the determination.

Today, (my opinion), a heavy rescue is a vehicle and crew capable of preforming most if not all of the technician level skills as defined in NFPA 1670. This would include heavy lifting, breaching, complex disentanglement from machines or vehicles, technical rope work, water operations, collapse building rescue, and the list goes on... The vehicle capable of all of that would be a dual rear axel giant tool box on wheels.

[cfdeng3]

First it would depend on what part of the country you are in. In RI, a rescue is a vehicle that transports people to the hospital. Known in other parts as an ambulance or bus. The "heavy rescue" is known here as a Special Hazards, other areas, such as Chicago, it is known as a Squad. The first heavy rescue, in the US, was Rescue One in NYC, established in 1915. ADSN is correct about the definition of a heavy rescue. It is typically a large rig that carries equipment used for heavy lifting, breaching, cutting, prying and anything else necessary to get people out of tight spots. Some common equipment carried is a jackhammer, airbags, hoisting equipment, come-alongs, grip hoist, air and wood shores, cutting equipment- torches and saws. Today we have added rope rescue equipment, trench equipment, and in areas that respond to water emergencies, the units will carry SCUBA equipment.
The vehicles needed to carry all of this specialized equipment are usually very large. Most of the major cities in the US have some type of rescue or squad.
As a result of the large number of earthquakes that California experiences, fire departments there along with OEM developed the Urban Search and Rescue Teams. There are I believe seven teams in CA alone and 27 FEMA USAR teams across the country. The first large scale deployment was the Oklahoma City Bombing and of course most recently the WTC and Pentagon bombings. These teams carry enough equipment to fill 2 C-130 aircraft. Most of these teams are staffed by firefighters from local departments that have undergone extensive heavy rescue training.

[greapr]

Thanks for the replys. It has been something that I have been curious about.

[truck6alpha]

FEMA, in Incident Command System for Structural Collapse Incidents , defines Heavy Rescue Capability as being able to handle collapses in reinforced concrete, steel structures, and/or involving confined spaces and voids. Furthermore, in the examples given for Tiered Response, they give Heavy Rescues the capabilities of rappelling, advanced hauling systems, confined space entry, cliff rescues, rope stabilization systems, Stokes basket rescues.

In our jurisdiction, the all of our engines are equipped for Light Rescue (Light Frame construction, basic rope and water rescue) and our truck company is equipped as a heavy rescue, although if we have a big incident, we also call our "rescue", which is an unstaffed support unit attached to one of our engine companies. The rescue carries additional support equipment for advanced incidents.

Hope this helps.