Rescue Platforms Are For Life
If you are in construction for any period of time, you’ll see someone have a medical emergency. Sometimes it’s work related, and other times it’s just the human condition. If you aren’t prepared, that person might be at the mercy of what the local EMS has readily available to save their lives. Sometimes it’s simply inadequate. We can do better if we just think ahead and prepare. At CraneGear, we can help.
This video is a perfect example of how bad it can get. A roofer on the 21st story of this building reportedly caught the roof on fire and found himself trapped from escape. The fire department was on site, but hadn’t come up with a way to reach him yet. The job site was thinking ahead and had our Rescue Platform ready to go. The results are dramatic.
I’ve personally witnessed people in distress where a crane would have been the way to get them out. A framer hit himself in the femoral artery with a nail gun. The person next to him realized the severity and got a tourniquet in place. The next move should have been to get him in a platform and fly him out. Instead the fire department had to rope him down several ladders to get him out because we weren’t prepared. If we were, he would have been on the ground waiting for EMS to arrive. Instead, we stood around and watched as they methodically got him out over 20 minutes.
I was a part of a training for the local fire department in a tower crane. They roped me out of the crane seat and off of the tower crane so they knew could. It was fun for me. but it was over an hour to get me out of the seat and down.
The reality is we have the right tools to get people out of below grade excavations and off of the working decks of a construction site. If our patient is in a condition where moving them to safety on the ground is safe, we should do it. We can save 20 minutes to an hour of rope work in getting our people to care in a hospital just by being prepared. In construction, it’s a really rare event that makes it so we need to secure a neck or bone prior to moving them. If that’s not what we are faced with, we should be getting the patient to the quickest care possible, and that isn’t done by waiting for EMS. A safety plan that has people stabilize a patient then do nothing is not an effective safety plan. If you have a 6-7 minute response time for EMS, you can have that patient on the ground by the time they arrive if you just act.
Let’s prepare for saving lives. Have a rescue platform at the ready. At the same time you are calling for EMS, the crane crew can be hooking up to the platform to be ready in case they are the right choice in valuing life. You can get a narrow and easy to store platform that costs $3611 and shipping so you can be ready. any job that has a crane, has hard to reach locations. Crane goes up, platform is on site. It should be a simple policy so we all can be ready to care for the person next to us at work. You have the tools, let’s make them work for life.
