It is often hard to know if you've saved someone's life. I don’t always know with these search and rescue missions if we actually did save the people, just that they were alive when we put them on the ambulance; or, in other cases, if they were really in deadly danger. Mostly they're tourists and you never hear about them again, so you don't know how it went one way or the other.
That wasn't true today. This guy was succumbing to hypothermia when we got there, with a broken foot at the bottom of the second waterfall deep in a gorge. He was soaked to the bone because he fell in the river, and at three hundred pounds he was not coming out of there. His family knew where he was, but all of them together couldn't have brought him out. It was in the forties and more cold rain was falling.
The trails were precipices, slick with mud and sometimes so narrow that only one foot could step on it, with nothing but the gorge and the waterfall on the other side. It took hours to get him out, with ropes and pulleys and main strength, two feet at a time the whole way up. Then we had to carry him about a mile. That was as close as an ATV could get to where he had fallen, because for all that long distance the trails were too bad for one to travel.
He'll be ok now. A broken foot isn't that big a deal, not once you're safe and warm in a hospital instead of at the bottom of a cold, wet gorge. This time I know we brought somebody home.
5 comments:
.....and yet, there are people who do NOT believe in guardian angels.
May God bless you for your work.
Question: what was that dude thinking??????
Good work!
Good on ya.
Yes, most excellent job!
How do you keep him warm during the extraction?
I am imagining he was placed in some sort of stretcher-cradle assembly and winched out by hand?
Or is this a body harness type ascent?
Is there a place for battery powered winches in this sort of work?
So the only battery involved was on a couple of the blankets, which are heated with batteries. We brought in dry blankets and a couple of those heated blankets to warm him.
After that he was bound in a Stokes basket (see the appropriate section here). During the extreme inclines and declines, we used ropes and pulleys to assist in dragging it or sliding it. On the flatter sections where we could, seven of us lifted and carried it. When we'd get to another bad section, we'd put up rope lines to secure the people on the sides of the trail and slide it some more. Eventually we got it to the ATV, which was able to carry the basket with him in it back to the ambulance. There he was transferred to a stretcher and taken to a hospital.
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