By Jill Sperling

KFR brushes up on rope rescue skills at Sandman Centre

Mar 12, 2019 | 3:19 PM

KAMLOOPS — Way up in the rafters of the Sandman Centre, members of Kamloops Fire Rescue are taking a refresher course in rope rescue. 

“We come in and do a couple different scenarios where we’re picking up a patient,” said Lt. Ryan Cail of KFR, “kind of simulating if a window washer was dangling off a building, or you’ve got to pick somebody up off the floor, or even a city employee that could be having a medical emergency in the rafters somewhere.”

The skills they are brushing up on will come in handy in real-world situations. 

“It’s quite a bit of technicalities to it, there’s a big difference between steep slope and high-angle rescue but we have done over the years a number in Peterson Creek,” Cail said. “Actually, we’ve got some new anchors in there, we can train in there as well as coming in here and other city facilities. 

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“We’ve gone off buildings downtown, like the Bank of Montreal building, anything that’s got something that could potentially be realistic for us is really good practice.”

Everyone involved in Tuesday’s training exercise is highly skilled in technical rope rescue. 

“We’re a really fortunate department, we’re actually technically trained quite well, and we’re really fortunate with a lot of the gear that we’ve got,” Cail said. “So you were on what we call a mirrored system, so you’ve got an orange line and a green line, two different lines, we’ve got a piece of equipment on there that we recently purchased, thanks to the tax payers of course, an MPD (Multi Purpose Device) is what it’s called, so you can use this piece of equipment in either a lowering or a raising, so once you’re tied in it’s super fast.”

KFR continues to train to keep their skills sharp for the next time someone gets themselves into a tricky situation. 

“It’s like riding a bike, if you don’t do it all the time you’re good at it, but you kind of lose some of the skills too, so having the opportunity to practice these just keeps us sharp when we go.”