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It's not just in fires that New York's Bravest put their lives on the line to save others. Now they have a new tool to help them get ready for a different kind of rescue. NY1's Amanda Farinacci has the story.
Earlier this month, a construction worker was killed in Brooklyn when he fell into a ditch that collapsed on top of him. The sides of the trench weren't reinforced, and when everything caved in on him, he was buried for nearly 40 minutes as members of the FDNY's rescue squads worked to pull him out. The man died a short while later.
The incident is exactly the type of scenario a new simulator at Randalls Island is meant to prepare firefighters for.
“We put our firefighters at risk on a daily basis, and we never know what we're going to encounter,” says FDNY Chief of Department Peter Hayden. “This allows us to train our firefighters in an environment and really school them.”
As in a real trench collapse, firefighters are trained to make sure the walls are secured before they do anything else. That's to protect them from becoming trapped.
The next step is the rescue, often called a “confined space rescue,” because there is often little room to remove a victim if there's a danger of a second collapse. In this simulation, firefighters pull a "victim" out of the ground.
“A trench collapse traditionally is a very complex rescue,” says FDNY Chief of Rescue Operations James Daly. “It takes a high level of training, so this simulator will provide our members with that training to better perform their job in a safe manner.”
The training simulator was donated to the department's training academy in honor of Captain Michael Esposito, a firefighter from Squad 1 killed on 9/11. Several construction companies donated their time and labor to install the $150,000 simulator in his honor.
Firefighter Joe Esposito says his brother would have loved knowing his fellow firefighters are getting more training in his name.
“It’s for Special Operations Battalion, which Mike was a member of with the squad and rescue, and it was a big part of his life,” says Esposito. “I know he meant to a lot to the Fire Department, and this one was a little more special because he got his brothers to work together on it, so it's a little unusual.”
More than 100 firefighters in the department's special operations units have been trained on the new apparatus, and the FDNY hopes to have 400 trained by the end of the year.
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