Shoshone County FD1 hosts extrication training

OSBURN –– People cruising down Silver Valley Road may have noticed something a little different last week as they passed through Osburn.

No, it wasn’t firemen participating in their annual demolition derby – despite how potentially awesome that fictitious event would be.

It was a mass vehicular extrication training exercise hosted by Shoshone County Fire District Number 1(SCFD1).

Vehicular extrication is the process of removing a vehicle from around a person or thing who has been involved in a collision and conventional means of exit are either impossible or inadvisable.

The training was through the Coeur FOOLS (Fraternal Order of Leatherheads Society), a group that SCFD1 Chief John Miller has been involved with in various roles since 2016. Miller had been trying to get an extrication class for a few years, but there are a few requirements that come along with setting up such a class.

“I reached out and asked if they could send us some instructors,” Miller said. “They told me that if I could produce the site and some cars they’d produce the instructors.”

The gravel lot across from the District 1 Firehouse made for the perfect location and then Miller used his connections with the various towing companies across the Silver Valley, as well as a blast on social media to secure the vehicles for the class.

36 local firefighters and EMS personnel attended the two-day training including 10 from SCFD1, 10 from SCFD2, and the remaining were from other districts throughout Idaho’s five northern counties.

“We had guys from as far away as an hour north of Sandpoint make it to the training,” Miller said.

The ability to hold such a class is a rarity, largely because of the space and equipment requirement, which is why whenever a “local” agency is able to host one, groups from the surrounding regions do their best to get their people to them.

The equipment used in vehicular extrication is large and expensive and doesn’t just get pulled out for use on a whim – so being able to see it be used and handle it themselves is a big deal for the smaller, rural departments.

The 22 cars they had at their disposal were moved into various positions in order to simulate the different types of accidents that EMS crews might come upon in the field.

“After doing the classroom part of training on Friday, Saturday was spent entirely outside,” Miller said. “We had six different training groups, so each group was doing something different and everyone got to do everything at least once.”

The different hands-on areas included school bus stabilization, a T-bone scenario, cars driven beneath larger vehicles, cars on top of other cars, flipped-over cars, you name it and they got to simulate it.

When it comes to car accidents, emergency crews are working to give medical crews every single second possible – and learning how to extricate people properly and efficiently, could be the difference between saving a life or losing one.

Due to Miller’s membership with the FOOLS, the training came at a discounted rate for the local personnel who participated – this particular type of training can be very expensive, given the time and materials necessary to pull it off.

“They loved it,” Miller said of the trainees. “It’s hard to not be excited about getting to cut cars up. It’s one of the more fun training exercises that we get to do, but having that amount of cars with that amount of expertise is just so invaluable to us and our communities.”