STANTON, Ky. (LEX 18) — As warm weather moves into Kentucky, search and rescue teams in the Red River Gorge are keeping their skills sharp by training other first responders from around the country.
David Fifer is the coordinator for the RedSTAR Medical Wilderness EMS team. Along with Red River Rescue, they are teaching a High-Angle Medical Rescue course to students from Kentucky and beyond.
"New York, Massachusetts, Utah, Idaho, and lots of other places," Fifer said.
In Wednesday's scenario, a person fell from a cliff. Instructors train the students how to get to a patient in the wilderness and treat them while they're also evacuating them instead of having to wait to get them to an ambulance first.
"A lot of times, the idea has been very little medical care, just get the patient out of that situation and all the real medical care will occur in the ambulance," Fifer said. "In the wilderness environment, it may take a long time to access the patient and a relatively long time to actually raise them up the cliff. You might have to be negotiating ledges and obstacles and multiple resets of your rope system and those patients really need the full medical care that we can bring to them right then and there. We're talking about blood transfusions. We're talking about advanced airway management, then get them into a basket and raise them up that cliff using a rope system."
The instructors here are some of the same rescuers who got those students stranded on Courthouse Rock safely evacuated by helicopter back in January. They say incidents like the bridge rescue in Louisville a couple of weeks ago show how you never know when you might need these techniques.
"If you don't use it, you lose it. Where the bridge rescue is a once in a million career rescue, but because you're not getting that experience, you have to ramp up the training in order to be prepared for that. We're really excited that that got technical rescue out in the profile, so now people are going to be more anxious to get into that training, because you never know when things like that will happen," said Kristin Gousse.
Gousse is a Red River Rescue instructor and a member of Powell County Search and Rescue. As temperatures get warmer, she knows a lot more people will be getting out into the wilderness. Every time they teach one of these courses, they're also sharpening their own skills.
"That's the cool thing about being a part of this training company is we're doing it every day, so our skills are getting better and then we get to give back by being on volunteer search and rescue teams like Powell County," she said.
