Ironically, this comes after a full day of hypothermia teaching. The NCRC's Orientation to Cave Rescue is normally held over a weekend in the summer, but was in October this year to attract college students. (It was nice to hang out with people who asked "Where do you go?" instead of "Where did you go, way back when cell phones were the size of encyclopedias?")
The OCR gives people their first taste of cave rescue techniques. The students are either cavers with little rescue experience, or cops, firemen, and EMTs with little cave experience. I took the OCR two years ago, but since then haven't been able to find the time for a weeklong, so I took the OCR again.
"The one thing I KNOW about a cave rescue is I'm going to be dealing with hypothermia," says just about everyone who spoke the day before. Some of the best cave rescue people in the country were here, donating their time to show the uninitiated how to extract injured people from caves. And they all brought up hypothermia.
I brought my tent to camp outside the Onequethaw firehouse this weekend. I wasn't counting on the Northeast to do its Siberia impression. Friday and Saturday nights were mercifully spent on the linoleum inside of the firehouse. One or two hardy souls managed to get their tent stakes through the frozen tundra, but I wasn't that brave/boneheaded.
I was still wearing a light jacket, and not my winter coat. The jacket is my personal acceptance that the season has changed to fall. The coat is my personal acceptance that the season has changed to winter. I was not prepared to call winter three weeks before Halloween. The jacket was a protest.
The sked and communication demonstrations were held outside where there was space. This worked fine in June, but in October it had me counting down the seconds until we went back inside. This was much colder than I ever remember October being, and I lived in Wisconsin for two winters. I saw a lot of people cross their arms to bear hug their warmth from leaving. At least it wasn't just me.
Thanks to an insanely insulated winter coat, I don't need to alter what I wear much for winter. (My old winter coat is also insanely warm, so I wear it on winter cave trips, which makes me look like a commodities broker, but I don't care since I'm warm.) This zipperless jacket made me wish I had eight layers on, though.
Sunday morning was the mock. We all sprang into action, if by sprang you mean sit around the firehouse for two hours. We were divvied up into three groups, and my group, #2, went to the scene last. I played Gin with college students for an hour, wondering when we'd be called in, and if we were going to Clarksville or Onesquethaw (they never tell you until you're about to leave).
I still haven't been to an actual cave rescue (although getting locked in Surprise might count me on the other end of a rescue). I haven't seen the structure at work, except for the mock rescue at the end of OCRs, which are always train wrecks. Take people who by nature don't know much about cave rescue, tell them they're now incident commander, and then have five experienced cave rescuers ready to snipe them down when they make mistakes, and you've got a couple dozen cavers who feel like they just lit a match on the Hindenberg.
If the people who have worked on more cave rescues than you've been on cave trips recommend a way of doing things, it's best to listen to them. All the same, it's a bit confusing to think that if someone gets hurt, the first thing I have to do is run to the surface to set up a multi-level management hierarchy. It's like turning into a skid: the instinctual thing to do isn't always the best course of action.
Our rescue cave ended up being Onesquethaw. Five of us piled into someone's pickup, and we drove all of a mile to the cave entrance. It was frigid and rainy. I knew I�d be warmer once I put on my polypros and coveralls, but I sulked around in just the jacket for half an hour, because I�d be momentarily even colder in that period when I wasn't wearing the jacket or the coveralls.
As soon as I was suited up, I ran inside a big sheriff's van to hide from the rain. Several of us huddled there, until it was my turn to play rescue hero.
I got the assignment of Operations Manager. Uh oh. My boss was the Incident Commander, and I was working alongside the Logistics Manager.
Crap, what in the hell did Operations Manager do?
What an Operations Manager does is control the people flowing in and out of the cave. When people get cold or tired, they leave and fresh cavers get sent in, by me. Half of the OCR was in cave now, only five or ten minutes from the entrance. When the first of them came out exhausted, I'd send in reinforcements.
The only problem was, no one was coming out. The cave was eating everyone. There was a phone set up, but it worked so poorly and so many people were trying to relay information, I didn't want to use up a lot of time asking "So, uh, is anyone cold in there?"
A lot of cave rescue is Hurry Up and Wait. Sort of like vertical caving. As a matter of fact, this was a lot like standing at the bottom of a vertical pit. You're set to do some caving, but you don't know when you�re going to, communications with the rest of your group is only through concentrated yelling, you're standing in dripping water, and inactivity is turning you into an ice sculpture.
Several people offhand said to me "You're cold." Thanks for the news update. Everyone was cold. But I seemed a bit colder than most.
This wasn't like I was endangering the operation. There was a truck to get out of the rain a hundred feet away, and the patients weren't being slowed down a second by my relative temperature status. I could be dunked in liquid nitrogen and still be an effective Operations Manager, so long as I could say "Go" at the right time without my lips shattering.
To give students as much experience as possible, roles in the mock get switched whenever the instructors get bored. A new Incident Commander and Operations Manager were chosen. Now a utility caver, I was going in the cave.
Not so fast, though. They couldn't send a hypothermic caver in.
Hypthermic? I wasn't hypothermic, just cold. I was on the cusp of being officially hypothermic, they said, but if I warmed up I would then be allowed in the nice warm cave. It�s kind of like proving you don't need the money before they approve you for a loan.
I went on the fast track to warming up. I walked the nearby road. I drank hot chocolate. I put on a flannel shirt someone lent me. I wanted to do a lot of this stuff before, but my job was to stand by the entrance and wait for people who were smart enough to not leave the warmest place around.
The activity stopped my shivering, and I was cleared to cave. Inside Onequethaw it felt liek August. I was out of the rain, I was out of the wind, I was moving, and that extra flannel gave me a new warmth pocket. Life was good again.
The patient was bundled by this point, (we had two, but one could walk out on his own power) and a huge crew was carrying him through the cave. Onesquethaw is essentially one person wide through most of it, so traditional carries are out.
One of the rescue experts on Saturday told us about a Puerto Rican rescue where the entire operation was done passing the patient lap to lap. The method worked so well, they stuck with it even when the terrain allowed for other carries.
Onequethaw only allowed lap and turtle (passing the patient across backs where sitting's not convenient), so that's what we did. The more people lapping and turtling, the quicker we all got the patient out of the cave. No one was getting tired from it, so everyone stayed in cave. Hell, outside was a car wash.
I was toasty warm throughout the transport. The worst part came once the patient was extracted, and I had to go back outside in the rain. Don't send me outside! I'll live in Onesquethaw! It won't be much of a life, but at least I'll be warm!