If you’ve been reading either of two EMS blogs, both of which are part of the FireEMSBlogs community, The Happy Medic and/or Medic999, you know about their unique “exchange program” that has just begun. Justin Schorr, The Happy Medic, is a firefighter/paramedic in San Francisco and Mark Glencourse, who publishes Medic999, is a paramedic for the North East Ambulance Service in the UK.
After a few months of preparations, approvals, and signing-on-the-dotted-line, their respective departments are supporting this cultural and professional exchange where they are visiting and riding with each other’s EMS service. Mark arrived in San Francisco just the other day to begin the Stateside portion of the project. A few days after he returns home, Justin will pack up, walk barefoot through the airport and travel over to Newcastle to view operations from “across the pond.”
Another of our fellow bloggers, The Fire Critic has put together a good introductory posting about how all this came about. And he has assembled a good listing of all the links that will be covering their adventures, including the video portions that they promise to upload as this moves along. So start by reading the viewer’s primer at The Fire Critic HERE. And then check in daily at The Happy Medic and Medic999 to keep up with what’s going on.
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Last week we posted a story about the rescue of a tree trimmer in California who was trapped by a limb while out of sight from anybody. You can review the story HERE. One of our regular contributors, Dal90 posted a Comment that I believe has good training value, so I want to repeat it here at Lineup to make sure that it gets the exposure that I think it deserves. It’s a good topic for an informal drill and certainly worth following up on. So with that in mind, here is Dal90’s contribution to tree-trimmer rescues:
A good discussion to have locally is with some of your local professional arborists.
Especially among the climbers, many have training in co-worker rescue work. Ideally the groundsman has a cellphone with the cell phones for other climbers he can call if there is an emergency with his climber.
You can ask them at the same time if they’d like the cat in the tree calls. Smiley aside, they are the profession better equipped then us to handle those calls.
Last summer East Windsor, CT had a bi-plane crash land in a tree well off road. They ended up using a climbing arborist to make the rescue (IIRC he had witnessed the incident and offered his services — still took a long time to access the scene and decide his way was the least risky).
http://www.treecareindustry.org/articles/magazine/TCI0409_p24.htm
Today’s lineup is necessarily brief because I have some paperwork that I have to get started on. But first I’ll get some fresh coffee going while you get the equipment checked out. I’ll see you back in the day room in a little while.
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