Bombardiers love to see secondaries. They drop their bomb, it explodes, and a few seconds later there’s another set of explosions. Each of these is a secondary. The first problem has caused a chain reaction.
The goal of this post is to help you not be a secondary. Knowledge is a great weapon, so how do people become secondaries? The methods range from the heroic to the flat-out dumb.
“Man dies trying to save drowning child!”
It was our very first lesson in our Rescue Diver course: Don’t create another victim. No matter how much we applaud the spirit of the man in the headline — don’t be that guy. When executing a rescue, your first mission is to not become a secondary.
Here’s a podcast Salty and I did on helping:
An accident victim is often in a panic, and may make you a secondary if you don’t prevent that.
I am not saying “The heck with them, save yourself!” I’m saying, before you jump in the (often figurative) water, take the small time to:
Look around and access the situation, including risks to rescuers.
Think how to execute the rescue without exposing the rescuers to high risks.
I was reading a friend’s account of an awful accident she had that left her with a very broken leg and partially underneath tornado debris. She had to crawl herself onto a slab of debris, which the rescuers then pulled out from under the structure.
Note they didn’t just crawl in to haul her out. That would have saved her pain in the moment, but exposed them to high risk. That would be a bad trade, no matter how much my heart hurt for how she must have felt at the time.
Now with a good handle on the dangers and a plan in hand, go for it! The drive to rescue our fellows is one of the best parts of being human. Or being any animal, for that matter.
It doesn’t take much time to avoid being a secondary
It really doesn’t take much time. I remember all too vividly when Salty and I were taking a slide-in camper off of the truck. While he was beside it, the camper’s support leg suddenly failed and started to drop the camper on top of him. He did the only thing he could do: Held it up! And called to me to get something under where the leg belonged. Here’s the single most valuable part of my life in danger … but it only took me one extra second to choose the path in that didn’t put me underneath the camper as well.
Time well spent. And the only reason I had the wherewithal to do that in the middle of that stressful moment was because the concept had been drilled into me for years. We play like we train. Salty himself had gotten me a reflective vest for my car, and we’d talked about how not to be a secondary if stopping to help at an accident site. Because…
Accident sites invite secondaries
Accident sites are inherently dangerous. For one thing, something caused the original accident. Maybe that something isn’t still around to affect new people, but maybe it is. Keep your eyes open for it.
On a road, the other drivers are going to be distracted by trying to figure out what happened and may not be driving safely, so get yourself well off the road before trying to assist.
Speaking of distracted drivers…
It’s a good thing they already had the ambulances on hand…
Let’s bust a myth here. You do not walk with normal speed and attention while texting. You also do not drive with normal skill and attention while rubber-necking at an accident. Don’t try — and your job is to be driving if you’re in a driving lane.
I mean, seriously. How often have you been frustrated and annoyed by a traffic jam caused by an accident, and once you arrive you discover that all of the trouble is well off the road? The traffic slowdown was caused completely by people not paying attention to their driving.
This block is at a much higher risk of a fresh accident over the next half hour than nearly any other place in the city.
Don’t be this guy either, ok? We admire the spirit, if not the wisdom, of the person who dies trying to rescue another. There’s not a whole lot admirable in any dimension of someone who gets in an accident because they were fascinated by someone else’s accident.
Whether it’s a TEOTWAKI event or a car accident, whether you’re trying to rescue or just trying to get yourself elsewhere — there is nothing good about becoming a secondary. Make it a part of your mental playbook to take a moment to assess potential risks before proceeding. It’s a critical aspect of mental preparedness.