TRENCH RESCUE TRAINING - MAT-SU EMERGENCY SERVICES

Today's training is trench rescue technician class that is being put on by Advanced Rescue Systems, and they're training our responders from across the borough on how to stabilize a trench and go in and initiate a rescue that's subsurface. If you don't stay on top of this perishable skill, when the emergency happens, people aren't going to know what to do. A lot of times that leads people to be getting hurt. Trench collapses are actually pretty common here in the Mat-Su Suburro, we've had several trench rescues. They were digging at 10 or 15-foot depths.

Anytime there's an excavation done, the soil is disturbed and we really don't know how it's going to react. Every trench that's made is supposed to have trench boxes that go in and protect people from collapses. If those safety measures aren't followed and followed correctly, the whole walls would fall in. People can and do get trapped in trenches. Depending on the depth, it's very, very difficult to get them out.

We've rented an excavator for the week and we're digging trenches and we're able to get 25 people here to all work together as a group and have instructors. A lot of what the training we're doing today is trying to stabilize a trench, be able to safely get in and rescue a person and not endanger our firefighters in the process. This training is a technician-level training. At the end of the class, all of these students will be certified trench rescue technicians. And what that involves We bring instructors up, the instructors go through the equipment, they'll take them out into the field where the trench is.

They start with small shallow trench, go through the motions of how to function in a trench as a team and make the equipment function the way they want to. In each evolution they do, they increase the complexity, they increase the problems they have. By the end of the class they have very complex, very deep trenches that they have to do with all their equipment going far beyond their reach. Every evolution, every day, they're building upon the previous and pushing the students farther and farther out of their comfort zone. So when the actual thing happens, it'll be easier than it was in training.

Because the Mat-Su Borough is so incredibly varied and vast, it's vital that all of the Department of Emergency Services personnel have as much knowledge, experience, and equipment as they can. That's kind of the goal that DES has, is give as much specialty as far out in the borough as we can. No matter what happens, we'll have people that will be able to go in and intervene and save people's lives.