Rescue Capabilities
While we generally think of prepping as preparing for some widespread event, quite often life-threatening events are quite personal, involving just one person or a small group. All that is required is for someone to get themselves into a sticky situation with limited time for a rescue, and they are in a personal SHTF situation. Consider the Thai Cave Rescue that became a worldwide news story recently.
Twelve boys and their soccer coach entered a cave and became trapped because it rained, flooding parts of their exit route. The resulting rescue involved over 1,000 people, including cave divers from all over the world, people supplying pumps to drain the water, searching for alternative exits, filling air tanks, providing medical care, and just feeding all the other folks on site. If a rescue can turn into such a major endeavor when the world is in good shape, imagine a widespread natural disaster, with numerous collapsed buildings, communications out, and transportation grids disrupted.
An earthquake in a west coast city, or a major tornado through the middle of the country, could easily create these conditions. Any event placing someone in a position where a person is in danger and moving them is a challenge, creates a need for a rescue. If lots of people need rescuing at the same time, then the odds of deaths occurring goes up. Consider Hurricane Katrina or any of the serious hurricanes since then.
Thai Cave Rescue
Rescue Search Patterns
The first challenge in a rescue is locating the person who needs to be rescued. In the Thai cave rescue, the fact the soccer team was in the cave was determined rather quickly, but the cave had miles of tunnels, most of which were inaccessible once the water entered the cave. It took 9 days to locate the soccer team. In contrast, open water scuba rescues utilize search patterns to locate the diver needing rescue. An underwater rescue can require a search covering miles of ocean bottom, or in the case of a surface rescue, miles of surface. In a forest or other land surface setting, the same search pattern techniques can be employed.
Aerial searches employ search patterns in order to cover the ground as thoroughly as possible without wasting precious time locating the person needing rescue with repeated searches of one area while another area remains unchecked.
Learning basic search patterns is a valuable prep skill.
First Aid and Retrieval
Once the person in trouble has been found they need to be moved to a safe location. Depending on their condition, first aid may be necessary in order to prepare them for the move. What should be done in the way of first aid, depends on the situation.
Consider an open water rescue. Ever try to do CPR with chest compressions in the water? It doesn’t work. You can do mouth to mouth assisted breathing while moving the person in the water, but you need a solid surface for chest compressions. However, in most situations if you have a person in need of CPR, that would come first.
You need to evaluate each situation to determine what should be done before movement, during movement, or after movement. This will depend on how imminent any further danger might be vs. the condition of the person being rescued. Of course, the more first aid you know, the better your choices will be.
Rescue
Once you have located the person, applied appropriate first aid, and prepared for transport, the problem of moving the person must be addressed. If the person is injured, they may not be able to assist in their own movement. In the Thai Cave rescue, even though the soccer team was physically in pretty good shape, they did not have the necessary scuba skills to assist in their own transport. Once out of the cave they were moved by ambulance to the hospital.
(Note for scuba divers! If the person is suffering from a scuba injury such as the bends or a pulmonary embolism they will need a decompression chamber. Decompression chambers are not normal hospital equipment. Contact the Divers Alert Network (DAN) to find out where the nearest decompression chamber is to where you will be diving. If you are an active scuba diver I recommend joining DAN.)
Depending on where the person needs to be moved, and the equipment available, transport can be planned and implemented. This can range from loading the person into an ambulance, to having to carry the person out of a wilderness location, to ambulance transport. Learning carry techniques will help even if you only need to move the person a few yards, but will really help if you have to carry them any distance to get to a road or other improved location.
Summary
If you are active in outdoor activities, particularly those that take you to remote locations, be sure to learn about rescues. You may have occasion to rescue someone in your party if there is an injury or if they become separated and lost. Learn search techniques, First Aid, and how to do rescues from that type of environment, whether it be water, wilderness, or some other type of rescue.