I like knowing how to do useful things in caves. By and large, caving is not useful. It benefits just the people going in to look around and have fun. I believe this is because there's not a whole lot of useful stuff to do in caves. Keep it clean, map it, push the rare bit of unexplored territory, but that's it.
Until someone gets hurt. Then cave knowledge can, if not save someone's life, certainly lessen the amount of time they're strapped to a stretcher being dragged in agony.
There's only a cave rescue in this part of the country every year or two. Some NNJG members have assisted in rescues. (One or two have even been the patients.) I wanted to learn how to be helpful, so I took the cave rescue weekend by Knox Cave June 9-10.
We all met Saturday morning at the firehouse in Knox, NY. The thirty five people in the class were half cavers, half 'agency' (paramedics, firefighters, law enforcement). Our teachers (all of whom were volunteers) were a team of seasoned cave rescuers, including Joe Levinson. The entire weekend, several meals included, was only $40, so no one's making money off this. It's to teach people first, and hopefuly recoup expenses second.
Saturday would be teaching and practice, and Sunday would be going in a cave for a practice rescue. The worst kept secret that weekend was that the rescue would be at Knox. "Um, I don't know what you're talking about," the teachers would say, like parents accused of dressing up as Santa.
So how hard is it to move a guy out of a cave? Imagine you�re moving a sofa bed. This bulky sofa bed is slowly losing its body heat, as are all its movers. This unwieldy sofa bed probably has some physical ailment which causes it great pain, and any pressure on that ailment will only hurt more. This 200 pound sofa bed is being moved through what could be miles of tangled, tight passage where there's often no leverage and sometimes only room for single file transit. And you have virtually no communication with anyone more than ten feet away.
For half the morning, us cavers boned up on basic rescue and first aid techniques, while the agency people got a primer on caving.
To move patients, one of the most useful devices is a sked. (Most normal stretchers are too bulky and snag easily.) It's a thick flexible piece of plastic with straps along the edges to tie patients securely down. Technically it's for tying deer carcasses so hunters can drag a several hundred pound kill through the woods, but dead weight is dead weight (although hopefully not DEAD weight).
A phone system can be set up in the cave using a physical phone line. It's the same phone system used in Vietnam, and most phones used are Army surplus.
Saturday afternoon would be practice with moving patients. Our 'cave' for the next two hours would be the field and playground behind the firehouse. Lewis, an agency guy from the Army (he even wore fatigues), would be our patient. He was one of the bigger guys in my group, so we didn't get off easy by having to lift the 92 pound girl. A ledge by the end of a field provided a good half dozen imaginary obstacles. Trees became immovable rocks, little bits of flagging tape became immovable rocks, a bunch of wildflowers became immovable rocks.
Everyone got to take turns being the team leader. Joe or someone else would helpfully announce "Rockslide just killed Mike," or some other method of battlefield promotion. My turn of organizing was slow and ugly. Organizing half a dozen strangers to do your bidding is tough. Especially when they all have their own ideas of how to move the patient, and you're not even pretending to have faith in yours. There needs to be some confidence projected, actual or otherwise, or every five feet will cost twenty minutes in pivot debate.
One big mistake I (and everyone else) did was keep all the labor behind the patient. Whenever we reached an obstacle, there'd be the patient's head sticking in it, with the whole team several feet behind, and we'd have to move the sked backwards to let people through to pull the front.
It took two hours, but we moved our patient through the ledge, over a muddy mountain (pile of gravel), through a winding crawlway (benches by the parking lot) and up some steep inclines (playground slides). A three year old could have made the whole distance in two minutes.
Lewis finally got out of the sked for the last leg, so he could get some leader time in. He was incredibly efficient; the military had taught him to delegate very well. We only had a short distance to go under his leadership, but we were quicker and smoother than the rest of the trip. Even if we made a mistake, it would have been quickly rectified, and we'd be back on track within the minute. A good leader is essential to moving a patient. Ditto for people to follow the leader.
The Women's Auxiliary of Knox made us a damn good ziti and meatball dinner, which tasted especially good after two hours of crawling on gravel in the sun.
We split into threes again Sunday morning, and finally heard our 'actual' crisis. Someone got hurt in, surprise surprise, Knox Cave. Emily, as a novice who'd never been in a cave before, was reporting that her friend got hurt somewhere in Knox. She didn't know the names of rooms, but gave physical descriptions of how many crawls she went through. It sounded like the Lemon Room.
The Lemon Room is across the slippery rocks at the entrance, down the ladder, through the Keyhole crawl, on the other side of the Gunbarrel, through the Broken Room. That's a couple steep slopes, one 20-foot vertical ascent, and three tiny belly crawls (one of them being among the most infamous in the country). It only took ten or fifteen minutes to reach the Lemon Room, but coming out could be dozens of hours.
Most of my team was already inside when I finally shook the rigor mortis out of my boots. Our leader was on the surface, doing her best to coordinate our group of eight. I asked what I could do. The phone line needed to be installed, she said. I spent a few minutes making sure the phones were working right (they need to be pumped to get any power), and I went with another guy to the entrance pit. He had the spool, I had the phone in my pack.
One of the people here was under 18, and wasn't legally allowed in the cave for the practice. He could, however, keep the record of who went in the cave. "What's your name?" he asked.
"Sean Ryan. I'm bringing the phone line in."
"Who's the other guy?"
I had no idea. He was already out of sight. I walked to the pit. "Hey? What's your name?"
Twenty seconds of annoyed hesitation. "Dave," he shouted up.
"Dave!" I shouted up. I turned around and started to go in the cave.
"What's his last name?" Cripes. Dave had completely vanished by this point, so I had to really shout and wait a solid minute to get an answer. A pain in the butt, but essential for having an idea of who's in the cave at a given time.
I had only done Knox once before, but thanks to Dave's phone line, I was able to quickly follow it to the patient. It was right in the middle of the passage for the crawls, so I tried to not touch it. This is very handy for anyone new to a cave participating in the rescue: a trail of bread crumbs.
All the teaching volunteers were in the cave, with blue flagging tape on their arms to show that they weren't real. They'd advise and answer questions, but ideally they'd be silently watching a picture perfect rescue. Bwa ha ha.
Dave ran out of cable before we even reached the Gunbarrel. I stuck the two cords into the phone clamps, and reported that we were out. The other phone was at the top of a hill, so just by thinking ahead to bring the outside phone to the edge of the pit, we could have gained a hundred feet or so. As is, we'd have to splice a second line to this one.
Dave and I stood awaiting orders. All the rescuers in the passage, as well as all the blue armbands, gathered around the phone. The initial urge was to find the Lemon Room and help with the patient, but if we all did that we'd have thirty five people crowded in a room and no space to move.
We stood there for half an hour doing nothing. There was a lot of talk about what should be done, both among real people and the arm bands. The sked was in the cave, but not the padding for it. Or the padding was here, and the sked wasn't.
I was standing in the middle of the passage, trying not to lean against the rock and suffer heat conduction. The inactivity was frustrating. I was getting cold, and I was barely in the cave half an hour.
A comment was made that the patient didn't have the privilege of our half hour of conversation, and had no clue what the holdup was. He and all his rescuers were getting cold. I and another guy went over to relieve two of the people. I was glad I'd actually be getting to see and move the patient. I know all the peripheral jobs are important, but when I imagine being involved in a patient rescue, I've got my hand on the stretcher.
I hadn't been past the bench room in Knox before, but the other guy I was with knew where to go. It wasn't all that far, and after the belly crawl out of the bench room, I could just follow the voices and lights to the patient, who was actually in the tail end of the Broken Room. As we came in, the two coldest cavers were subbed out.
Our patient, Greg, was already covered in blankets, with foam padding underneath him to keep warm. Although Greg didn't really have a broken left leg, he'd get hypothermia as easily as anyone else sitting in a cave, so the blankets weren't pretend. Not that they were doing anything particularly useful, since not all the materials for moving the patient had arrived yet.
While we were waiting, we asked Greg how he was about twenty times. If the patient is a caver, he or she will probably be joking the entire time. Keeping the patient's spirits up by joking along is good. If the patient isn't a caver and/or is scared, serious comforting needs to be done. If a patient needs medicine, it can't be given by normal cavers, not even aspirin, without legal consequences. A caver can, however, say that he'd advise the aspirin if the situation was reversed, then put aspirin tablets on a rock by the patient with a glass of water. What the patient does is then legally their own responsibility.
Finally, the missing equipment got sherpaed into us. I found out later that it was being held up because it was coming in at the same time as the extension cord for the phone, which was inexplicably being set up as a second line right next to the first one. Why? Bad communication.
We slipped a flexible padded piece of aluminum under Greg's shoulders, so the sked wouldn't roll up around them. Padding went all around him, and the sked's straps were tightened. Greg was an blaze orange burrito.
Now came the moving. No one could stand, so we all had awkward lifting positions. The Knox ceiling let us brace our backs against them, but lifting with our backs was still discouraged. We moved him inch by inch, keeping all pressure off his left leg.
After half an hour of good movement, Greg had gone twenty five feet. Greg and the sked also happened to be on my left leg, filling a pothole his leg would have otherwise dunked into. I got the recommendation to get my leg out, but as people lifted the sked so I could move it, they also decided to move the sked, in the exact same direction I was moving my leg. So the sked moved five feet, and I was still stuck under it.
A chunk of rock broke off the ceiling and hit Greg square on the chest, after a brief ricochet off my nose. It was about the size of a popsicle. Gave me a little cut for a few days. Greg was unharmed, but rocks falling on you while you're tied up never does anything to boost your spirits.
I finally got my foot outfrom under Greg, and maneuvered to thread his head through a tight spot leading out of the Broken Room. We lifted, pushed, and nothing happened. The sked didn't fit. We tried a different approach. It didn't fit. We rotated Greg around, and tried it feet first. It just flat out didn't fit through the rock.
This was the first time a practice rescue was done past the Gunbarrel. Emily said previous practices and mocks were done closer to the entrance, and were usually completed fairly quickly. She threw this group a curveball to see how we'd fare under real grisly situations. One of these unforseen situations was an area the sked couldn't fit through.
We had to unbuckle the whole thing and have Greg crawl through on his own power. If this was a real rescue, he'd have to do the same thing. Since his injury was a broken leg, he kept weight off it. If he had something else wrong with him, he would have been in trouble. We pushed the now-empty sked in the slot, and it STILL didn't fit. That was reassuring in a way. We had to completely untie it, and flatten it out to two dimensions before it finally went through.
Once I stopped standing around the phone, I stopped being cold. Even laying flat against rock for half an hour moving the sked, I was still toasty warm. Activity really helps.
My part of moving Greg was now over, as was most of the moving. Greg did a good deal of crawling on his own, then got strapped in so the remaining students could get a chance to move the sked. He had been faking the bum leg for four hours by this point, and the class was due to end soon.
In the several hours I was working to move the patient, he moved maybe thirty feet. It was tight, slanted passage, but still, with a rate like that I can see how daunting even a rescue a hundred feet in can be. An injury at the halfway point in Simmons-Mingo, with a mile of obstacle course on either end, could take weeks.
Things aren't always this bad with real rescues. For one thing, the organization is much better. Everyone going through a cave passage takes note of how the patient could be moved through, so when the stretcher or sked reaches it, there's already been hours of thought given to it. Plus, most difficult spots usually get someone assigned to specifically getting the patient through it.
As I came out, the kid asked my name for the log book. "Wow, you've been down there a while." I didn't mean to, it just played out that way. The biggest danger to the rescuers, from repeated statements in the class, was cavers pushing themselves too hard and too long underground. No one wants to wimp out and say "I'm too tired to continue," so they push on in a weakened state, and stand a bigger chance of getting themselves or someone else hurt. I wasn't tired while moving Greg, but in accordance with this, I was all set to tap out when a replacement for me came. No one ever did, so I stayed with Greg longer than most anyone.
I got a huge amount out of the class. There's no way to be 100% prepared for a recue, but I'd be confident going in. There's a few of these weekends throughout the year. There's also weeklong intensive courses that go into detail on things our class was too short to touch on, such as water rescues. I'd recommend these classes to everyone.