A River Runs Through It
Swift Water Rescue Part I
One of the greatest things about the small community I live in is the opportunity to learn new skills. As a member of our small volunteer fire department I was able to spend this past weekend getting Swift Water Rescue Tech certified by the industry’s leading instructor Nate Ostis of wilderness-rescue.com (He literally wrote the book on this stuff).
This was an effort that was put together by several agencies in our greater area which included “Idaho Mountain Rescue,” “Wilderness Ranch Fire Department,” “Robie Creek Fire Department,” and our group from the “Rural Atlanta Fire Department.” This whole idea was years in the making and partially due to the fact that Idaho has the most river front roads of any state in the lower 48 and we often see motorists and recreaters getting into trouble, some of which need rescuing when we have high water levels. So, to make sure that we can actively help our citizenry when needed we saught to get Swift Water Rescue Tech certified and sent four of our members (including myself) for the three day course.
When I showed up on Friday, however, I had no idea what I was actually in for. I thought we may learn some basic first aid, learn how to wear our shiny new dry suits, and throw a few ropes, which we did learn all of those things, but the course turned out to be so much more.
...but, as most of these types of classes go we started the first morning diving into powerpoints. Thankfully our instructor Nate was animated and wanted to get us into the field as quickly as possible and into the water, so it was minimal death by powerpoint, but the few slides we did review were impactful.
Mostly it was helping us understand the true raw power that these rivers actually do posses, relating them to non-stop running avalanches... something I initially wrote off, but would come to appreciate later in the weekend. We also watched several (failed) swift water rescue attempts from the late 80’s which helped shape the curriculum we were learning over the next three days.
For the rest of the day we reviewed and critiqued all of the equipment we had purchased before loading up in the trucks after lunch to head to a very tame portion of one of our river estuaries. We all gathered around complaining about the heat trapped in our suits (we would later regret this complaint once the snow set it later in the weekend) where we waited for instruction on how to toss bags to fictitious people who may be trapped in the river. After some pretty crappy tosses, we started to get it figured out and were starting to toss our rescue ropes with more accuracy.
After an hour of parking lot work we finally walked to the waters edge to get wet. We learned the basics of the low angle swift water rescue dives and started to paddle around some. The buoyancy of our suits and PFD were a bit awkward at first but in pretty short order we were swimming around like minnows in a pond. After a few practice rope tosses to slowly passing by “swimmers” we wrapped the evening up with some review and were told to get some rest as we would be meeting upriver at 8:30 am the next morning to explore some of the “big water” that was starting to swell due to spring runoff.