Ocean City, Wildwood firefighters learn the ropes
OCEAN CITY — Cape May County’s Urban Search and Rescue team (USAR) is ready to respond to help its fellow departments across the county when special circumstances require members’ specific skills.
The USAR members also work to share their skills, training other firefighters.
Ocean City firefighter Matt Long and Wildwood firefighter Rich Harron are members of USAR and Task Force One, a tactical rescue team for the state of New Jersey. They spent April 16 teaching members of their respective departments rope skills.
The skills are the type used to lower an injured person down from heights or up from an enclosed space such as a manhole, using ropes, pulleys, harnesses and manpower.
They could be seen atop the 46th Street firehouse in Ocean City, raising and then lowering a stretcher from the roof. Indoors they were working on teaching other skills.
Harron was inside the firehouse, where firefighters have set up a regular training space. He was demonstrating the Arizona Vortex, a tripod device meant to create a high point, such as directly over a manhole. He had firefighters lowered by the pulleys and ropes by their colleagues and then raised through a narrow second-story space.
“It’s basically a tool we would use to effect a rescue of a downed utility worker in a manhole,” he said.
He explained just like not all police departments have SWAT units, not all fire departments have a USAR team.
The Wildwood and Ocean City firefighters taking training were a mix of on-duty and off-duty members eager to learn the skills Harron and Long were teaching, according to Ocean City Deputy Chief Richard Bickmore Jr.
“This is basic rope training,” Harron said. “Anything high off of a roof, in a confined space, even low-angle moving an object. If you have somebody pinned between two objects, it’s important to understand the equipment, the ratings, how it all applies to the forces we’re using to move or recovery.”
The Wildwood firefighter added the county USAR team does the tactical rescue services but offers the training to other firefighters.
“This is how we provide these services to the volunteer fire departments throughout the county,” Harron said.
Long was working indoors and outside. A ladder truck was used to raise a stretcher to firefighters on the roof of the firehouse. The firefighters, under Long’s supervision, used the rope and pulley system to lower the filled stretcher back to the ground.
He explained not only are he and Harron on the USAR team and New Jersey Task Force One, they’re also a FEMA team, one of the 28 teams in the Federal Emergency Management Agency system that deploys nationwide for any type of disaster or collapse.
Long said he spent 18 days in Asheville, N.C., during Hurricane Helene as part of that team.
As USAR members and part of their respective fire departments, Long said they got together and decided there was a need to provide the rope training for their peers, including some of the younger members, having them learn this earlier rather than later in their careers.
“The current situation in the fire service is that we are the fire department. Our primary responsibility is extinguishment of fires, protecting lives and property for any type of structure fire,” he said. “But we’re not just a fire department anymore. We’re an all-hazards department and we do a lot of technical rescue.”
That includes water rescue, extricating accident victims from vehicles and emergency medical services.
“We’re always getting pulled in seven directions,” Long said. “I always say it’s either ducks in a storm drain, a house fire with people hanging out the windows or going to tell someone they can’t have a bonfire.”
With his and Harron’s accumulated experience, they want to bring what they have learned to the fire department level.
“This is a very important thing for us. Knowledge transfer is extremely important to me because I don’t want to be the only guy that knows how to do things when things go bad,” Long said. “I want a whole crew of guys.”
“I want to bring this to everybody,” he added. “All the instructors here are volunteering their time because of the level of importance to feed these guys what they want, what they need and to make us better.”
Long noted his appreciation for support from the city, from Mayor Jay Gillian and members of City Council to Fire Chief Bernard Walker and Deputy Chief Bickmore.
Bickmore said firefighters came on their own time to get the hands-on training.
“When they can dedicate their time, a good eight hours with hands-on and not have to worry about handling other incidents, it makes the training flow better,” he said.
He agreed with Long’s sentiment that it makes absolute sense to have more firefighters with the USAR training.
“Matt Long and Rich Harron are on New Jersey Task Force One, which is a tactical rescue team for the entire state of New Jersey,” he said. “They’re also a FEMA team that gets deployed all over the country when there’s disasters, hurricanes, big building collapses and stuff like that, so they have a lot of knowledge that they can bring back to our department and provide to the guys who don’t have that opportunity.”
Bickmore said it’s good to have a working relationship with the career fire department in Wildwood.
“They’re able to provide us some of their instructors that have a lot of knowledge and vice versa. We’ll send guys down there to help them out when they’re doing big training like this.”
– STORY and PHOTOS by DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
