Grant Schwalbe's Page

Firefighter CPR-A Different Perspective

Giving full credit to Leland FD for first showing us an option for Firefighter CPR.  As with anything we see online, on FB or in a video, we study it, try it out and see how it fits into our department, staffing and circumstances.  That being said, three things stood out to us as we trained on Firefighter CPR.  The compression guy was always in the way, We may not have 3 people available initially and perhaps most important is that we…

Imagine you are dispatched to a motor vehicle collision and when you arrive you see a driver unconscious with trauma to the neck and upper extremities bleeding profusely.  Without quick action he is sure to die.  But there are power lines on the car.  What comes first?  Deal with the power lines or go for the victim?

Many of us around the country are arriving…

When training on search, victim removal often gets very little attention.  Victims are most often found in one of two places:  a path of egress or in a bedroom. Logically, if the victim were 5-10 feet inside the front door, we would simply drag him/her out quickly.  But if the victim is found in a bedroom behind a closed door we must be careful not to do additional harm to this victim.  We say it often on our classes, “If you crawl through a smoky, hot hallway and open up a bedroom door and…

Over the past 2 years my department has re-evaluated our high-rise setups.  In doing such we moved away from carrying 50’ of 2.5” hose, a gate-wye and 100’ of 1.75” hose to carrying 4 bundles of 2” hose.  Because we changed the hose configuration we also re-evaluated how we bundled it.

4 options

FDNY Load-Fit well in our compartments, deployed great, wanted a way to carry it over shoulder or bottle rather than on shoulder.

Denver Load-didn’t fit well in…