“It’s not something that we do every day,” Cedar Rapids Firefighter Weston Platz said, explaining the importance of training.
Emily Andersen The Gazette, Cedar Rapids, Iowa
CEDAR RAPIDS — Working in and around trenches — or any hole that is deeper than it is wide — can be an almost daily occurrence if you work in construction, according to Weston Platz, a Cedar Rapids firefighter who used to work for a construction company.
Every once in a while, though, something will go wrong and a worker may find themselves stuck in the bottom of a trench, buried under fallen dirt or other material. At that point, the everyday situation becomes a high-risk rescue.
That is why the Cedar Rapids Fire Department on Wednesday completed a trench rescue operation drill. The goal was to make sure firefighters are prepared to face what could be a highly dangerous situation.
“It’s not something that we do every day,” Platz said. “So, not getting our hands on the tools every single day and not seeing this type of stuff every day, and with it being such a dangerous situation, we really need to go through these scenarios so that when it does happen, we’re ready and prepared to go down in there and do the work.”
The training Wednesday involved rescuing a plastic dummy from the bottom of a trench. It took the team of about a dozen firefighters about an hour to complete, but a real trench rescue scenario likely would last four to eight hours and involve a lot more first responders, Cedar Rapids Fire Capt. Andrew Engelken said. Those responders would include emergency medical teams and firefighters called in from other agencies for support.
“It’s a very labor-intensive, resource-intensive operation. Normally, if this was a real call, we’d have probably twice as many people. They’d be doing a lot of things simultaneously,” Engelken said. “But here it still is a learning environment. So, they’re talking with some of the younger, newer guys as to what they’re doing, but we’re going through the same progressions as if this was an actual event.”
The dummy the team rescued for the training hadn’t been covered in dirt, so it wasn’t too difficult to reach at the bottom of the trench once the proper equipment was set up to keep the firefighters safe. In a real trench rescue situation, Engelken said a lot more time likely would be spent digging the victim out, sometimes one bucket of dirt at a time.
The last time the department responded to a real trench rescue scenario in Cedar Rapids was in May 2023, when a trench collapsed on a man repairing utility lines to a business in the 600 block of First Avenue SW. The man was successfully rescued and sent to the hospital with injuries to his lower extremities.
That was the only time Engelken has seen the training used within Cedar Rapids, but the fire department has been called to help with similar trench rescues in nearby jurisdictions.
“The nice thing is that we team up with Marion, Iowa City, other agencies that train on this as well, just because it’s such a labor- and resource-intensive operation,” Engelken said. “This is not a very common thing. This is a high-risk, low-frequency thing that we do. So, that’s where the training is of the utmost importance. We just don’t do it very often, so we’re not exposed to it on a regular basis.”
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Trenches are used to do work on septic lines, water lines or any other utility that goes in the ground, Platz said. Usually, they’re safe. Construction companies following best practices have multiple safety features in place to prevent a trench from caving in and to protect workers from significant harm if it does.
