When it occurred on April 19, 1995, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City was the most devastating terrorist attack ever committed on American soil. The carnage was stunning. The blast destroyed or severely damaged 324 buildings within a 16-block radius. Worse, it killed 168 people — including 19 children — and injured nearly 700 more.

The terrorists had crammed nearly 5,000 pounds of fertilizer, chemicals and diesel fuel into a rented box truck, which they parked outside the federal building. When the bomb detonated, it caved in one-third of the 9-story building and created a crater that measured 30 feet in diameter and eight feet deep. Hundreds of people were buried in the enormous pile of rubble, which consisted largely of reinforced concrete. Many of them had been injured by shattered glass.

From the perspective of Oklahoma City’s first responders, the incident represented a confined-space-rescue event like nothing they had experienced before, said Jon Hansen, director of Oklahoma’s Council on Firefighter Training and a retired assistant chief of the Oklahoma City Fire Department. “What we encountered was a massive building collapse with extremely heavy lift challenges,” Hansen said. “At the time, we weren’t equipped to handle that. We had some previous confined-space experience dealing with below-ground rescues, but a large structure collapse certainly challenged us.”

The mind-boggling volume of debris that had to be sifted through to find victims was vexing by itself, but the fact that the building was constructed primarily of reinforced concrete added to the challenge, Hansen said.

“When we’re dealing with a concrete floor only, we can saw through it and then take it out as a block,” he said. “But when there’s steel involved, the concrete adheres to the steel and it won’t come out as easily. We also have to cut through the steel as well as the concrete.”

One of the key lessons that Hansen learned from this experience was the importance of developing a comprehensive knowledge base concerning construction tactics and materials for the structures within a department’s jurisdiction, particularly those that house many workers or residents. Knowing what you’re going to be dealing with before you roll up to the scene can save precious time and perhaps preserve the life of a severely injured victim. But Hansen concedes that building such a knowledge base isn’t an easy task.

“There’s a big difference between facing a building that’s primarily concrete and one that’s concrete and steel,” he said. “So you have to keep up to date — but it’s always changing.”

Speaking of the severely injured, they pose significant challenges for first responders dealing with a confined-space rescue. First and foremost is the tactical challenge of extricating them from an environment that is fraught with peril. But that challenge leads to another that is more psychological, as the very nature of confined-space rescues forces responders to think and act in ways that they find counterintuitive. The Oklahoma City incident provided a textbook example of this phenomenon, according to Hansen. Rescuers knew that dozens, perhaps hundreds of victims were buried. In some cases, the rescuers could hear the victims crying for help and even were able to talk with some of them. Their firefighter instincts screamed at them to start digging. But that would have been the worst thing they could have done, as there were too many unknowns. For instance, had the pockets where victims were trapped filled with hazardous gases? Were any live power lines exposed? Was the debris stable, or was there danger of a secondary collapse that would have endangered the rescuers?

The circumstances clearly called for patience, which wasn’t easy to muster, according to Hansen.

“We knew that by trying to perform these rescues as carefully as possible, we might see a patient slip away on us, and that was very difficult for us to accept,” he said. “But we didn’t want to do something that would bring a secondary collapse down on them and us. We really tried to communicate to our men and women that we wanted to be part of the solution and not become part of the problem.”

However, there came a point when the rulebook was tossed aside. An order was issued to evacuate the building because one of the rescue crews had stumbled upon what they initially thought was a second explosive device. But another crew was working on a victim and decided that they couldn’t, in good conscience, leave him behind, despite the apparent danger.

Complicating matters was that the victim was in a location that made extrication particularly challenging and — more to the point — time-consuming. All of these factors had to be mulled and decided in a matter of seconds because, as Hansen pointed out, “we didn’t have the luxury of time.”

It all worked out — the victim safely was extricated and survived, and none of the rescuers were injured in the process.

“It’s a great success story,” Hansen said. But he acknowledged that this probably was not the wisest decision. Had there been an explosion and a secondary collapse, four to five firefighters could have been severely injured or killed. In addition to the devastating effect that such line-of-duty deaths would have had, there also likely would have been legal ramifications.

Yet, Hansen understands why the crew opted to ignore the evacuation order. “It’s not always easy to separate the heart from the head when lives are at stake,” he said. “It’s a human thing. We’re here to save lives — and we know that we’re going to be in danger.”

Look Before You Leap

John Griffin had an experience in 2004 that was similar to Hansen’s, but on a much smaller scale. A liquid-propane gas explosion destroyed the 4-story ICL Plastics factory in Glasgow, Scotland, and in the process killed nine workers and injured 33 others. Roughly 100 people were in the brick building at the time of the blast, so search and rescue was an imperative, just as it had been in Oklahoma City. This incident was strikingly similar in that regard, and in the sense that the event represented a watershed moment for the area’s first responders, as none of them ever had experienced anything quite like it.

But there was one significant difference that paid huge dividends. Members of Strathclyde Fire & Rescue — the second-largest fire brigade in the U.K., with 111 stations — had trained just two months prior to the incident at Disaster City, the facility operated by the Texas Engineering Extension Service (TEEX), which is part of Texas A&M University. In another stroke of good fortune, so had first responders from several agencies in the Glasgow area who were among the 400 rescuers dispatched to the incident.

“There were several benefits,” said Griffin, who at the time was Strathclyde’s group commander — the equivalent of a battalion chief in the U.S. — and its director of technical-rescue training, but who now is working for TEEX as its international project coordinator. “Because all the teams that went to Texas had the same training, there wasn’t a lot of posturing during the incident or concerns about each other’s skills or competencies. That made life easier.”

A specific tactic learned during the Disaster City training that also made life easier — and helped to keep rescuers safer — was mapping of the affected area.

“We would indicate the areas that had been shored up so that it was safe for rescuers to enter,” Griffin said. “We also used technical search cameras, which were quite innovative at the time. We would insert them into a void to determine whether there was anybody alive and the extent of their injuries, and to identify potential hazards.”

The idea was that it is better to risk the camera than the life of a rescuer because, “you often are unsure of where the dangers are,” Griffin said.

Linas Cernius, the discipline head for confined-space rescues at Tualatin Valley (Ore.) Fire and Rescue near Portland, agreed with that assessment. “It’s the stuff that you can’t see that will kill you,” he said. As an example, he told of an incident that occurred on the Columbia River involving a barge. In the hull were several tons of wood chips, seemingly a benign substance. But unbeknownst to the crew, those chips had begun to decompose and in the process had released noxious gas that overcame one of the workers who had descended into the hull. If the rescuers had been hasty upon arrival, they too might have been overcome. But because they were patient and took proper precautions — which involved donning an air supply — the rescue was executed without incident.

His advice for confined-space rescuers is to always look before they leap. “Firefighters always want to rush in, but in a confined-space situation, they need to take a step back.”

A Training Paradox

Grain silos represent another confined-space environment where hidden hazards lurk, according to Lt. Ryan Reynolds, a 14-year veteran of the Streator (Ill.) Fire Department. He also is the manager of the confined-space-rescue program at the Illinois Fire Service Institute at the University of Illinois.

For instance, sometimes the top of the grain layer in a silo will harden, similar to the initial ice layer that forms when a pond begins to freeze. Most of the time, it’s not a problem. But every once in a while, a hollow develops underneath the hardened grain — step on it, and you fall in, after which you quickly can become engulfed. It’s a situation that is just as problematic for rescuers as it is for farm workers, which is why Reynolds also urges that rescuers take extreme caution before entering into a confined-space situation.

Of course, training can be leveraged to instill this mindset and to teach important skills. One of the tactics that Reynolds teaches is the use of wristlets and a grain rescue tube that can be employed to keep a victim from being further engulfed during the rescue.
Another is to lower rescuers into the silo, rather than allowing them to rappel down; rappelling down would be challenging due to the amount of gear the rescuer might be carrying, Reynolds said. This holds true for any environment where egress is via a narrow opening, such as tanker cars and sewer pipes.

But training for confined-space rescue often is at the bottom of a department’s to-do list. The situation is a paradox of sorts. It could be argued that departments should train for confined-space rescues more than any other response because they happen so infrequently — unlike structure fires, vehicle extrications and the like, which happen on a daily or weekly basis.

“This is a low-frequency, high-risk activity. It doesn’t happen that often, but it’s pretty dangerous when it does — which is exactly why it requires more training. We have to try to stay up on this stuff because we don’t do it every day — it’s not an ambulance run or a house fire,” Reynolds said.

But most departments eschew such training precisely because the incidents of confined-space rescues are few and far between.

“Unfortunately, with the economy being what it is, the first thing that gets cut is the training budget,” Reynolds said. “We still try to do what we can, but on a limited budget you’re more handcuffed, and the tendency is that you cut the things that you don’t encounter very often.”

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