to the OP: in a nutshell, yes.
Rule #1 in ANY emergency service is “Go home to your family at the end of your shift”
Rule #2 “Be part of the solution, not part of the problem”
Dead and or seriously injured rescuers cant help anyone else, and plenty of these situations need everyone they can get.
Rescuers charging in recklessly and needing rescued is being part of the problem. Temperatures inside heavily involved structures can bake a firefighter in their protective gear in 10-15 seconds. To quote the Tick “Gravity is a harsh mistress” and it will kill you just as dead as fire, being submerged in water, or any number of potential threats.
However firefighting and rescue work are by their nature the realm of creative problem solving and its very rare that there is no way to pull it off with reasonable risk.
I was certified ice diver back in my time on FD. Certainly don’t mean to be an ass, but you did enter a question mark on the 5 min time. I did both dry suite and wet suite ice diving and dove Lake Superior many time in both. The 5 min time, if you are remembering correctly would have had to be diving w/o either, as in diving with out any exposure suite of any kind. And in a situation such as you presented a rescuer might have made an attempt using an SCBA (firefighters air pack) in place of SCUBA gear.
Any unsuccessful Rescue is hard on everyone, that is why we try so darn hard!
Not being able to save the child is understandable : cold water is unswimmable, drowning is deadly, kids have very little insulation or internal heat relative to their surface area and often don’t know how to swim. However, is there some way to at least recover the kid’s body? Some kind of ultra-bright light or sonar equipment or something that would let you quickly scan a hundred meter or so area around the hole to find him or her?
Always?? A friend of mine, who is a fire captain, said that they were trained that firefighters were always first.
Also, I’m thinking that the rescue personnel wouldn’t tell the people that they were goners, just say something like “We’re trying…doing what we can…etc…”
It comes up in mountain rescues all the time. If someone is missing or a distress call is made the rescue team has to evaluate the possibility of rescue. If there is a storm or chance of avalanche they might delay until they can go out safely. The answer is never ‘sorry good luck bye’ it’s ‘sorry we can’t get to you yet, we’ll make another attempt when the weather clears or we get the right equipment here’
It’s a suit, man: not a suite.
It amuses me when I see people arguing that the police should accept being beaten and injured as part of the job without escalating force because fire fighters accept the chance of being killed or injured. Every first responder accepts risk. But those risks are mitigated as much as possible. Fire and rescue personnel do not go into a scene unless it has been secured. If a fire fighter is killed or injured it is usually because someone screws up and there will be a major investigation. No one chalks it up to the price of doing business. Everyone wants to go home at the end of their shift. No one is running into a building if it is about to collapse. If they do they will hear about it later from their fellow FFs who they put at risk. Hotdogs and cowboys don’t last long. There is a proper way to do things which both helps mitigate risk and optimize the chance of success.
I think that if a suspect has their hands in a pocket or otherwise hidden from view, or if the suspect is obviously unarmed but “charging” the officer, the officer should go to prison for manslaughter if they shoot the suspect.
This is no different a standard than a civilian would be held for. I think that in order for an officer to be permitted the shoot, they must have actual sight of a firearm, or the suspect must be at extremely close range and have a knife. The current guidelines are far too vague and far too biased in favor of the cops shooting anyone they want.
If they aren’t willing to take those risks, they should find another profession. A guy with his hands in his pockets might have a gun, but it is overwhelmingly likely that he does not. Moreover, even if said guy had a gun, the probability of him being able to hit the officer with a gunshot in an area unprotected by body armor (head or neck basically), shooting without proper form or being able to see his own gun, is very very very low. (and if the cops are facing the kind of pistol expert who can pull off a shot like that, they’d already be dead)
Every first responder understands the risks. That does not mean they have to meekly take their punishment. EMTs are not required to go in and treat people when the scene is dangerous and not secured. Fire fighters are not required to enter an unstable building. Police officers are not required to get injured before defending themselves.
The standard for police or anyone is a reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury. The standard is not lower for police officers. In fact it is higher since it is how a reasonable officer would feel not a hypothetical reasonable person. How it relates to each instance must be on case by case basis. Having bright line rules for what is a unique situation in every instance is not feasible. The suggestion that anyone should take the job with the expectation to take the first shot because it probably won’t kill you is fucking ridiculous. Along the lines of wondering why fire fighters don’t run into buildings that are in danger of collapse. They took the job didn’t they?
In Soviet Russia, hypothetical reasonable person feels YOU!
Hey, if officers wanted there to be no risk at all, we could legally authorize them to blow away anyone they can’t see the hands of. After all, if you can’t see someone’s hands, they might have those hands on a bomb detonator or a machine gun. Or maybe they needed to scratch their nuts. Better safe than sorry, right?
By your analogy, firefighters would never enter burning buildings. Not ever. They’d spray em with hoses from the outside and encourage people verbally to escape on their own. That’s about where a lot of cops are right now. They’ve shot to death several totally naked men the the last couple years. Hundreds of people in total have been shot to death who were not found with a gun or a knife (or comparable weapon of the same class) in the last decade. American police have shot to death far more unarmed people than criminals have shot to death police officers.
Moderating
I don’t think we need to get into a hijack about police use of force. If you want to discuss this further, please open a new thread in Great Debates (if you feel the many existing threads aren’t sufficient). Let’s restrict this to discuss of the factors involved in deciding on rescues.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
It’s a VERY tough call when you’re contemplating a dangerous rescue of people. But despite what you see on TV, many/most fire departments are not going to come out and rescue Whiskers the cat from a tree branch.
Most intelligent fire chiefs will scoff at the idea, reasoning correctly that you rarely see cat skeletons in trees, and that most kitties will get down by themselves when they’re hungry enough.
But there’s no accounting for people eager to star in TV reality shows.
I’m surprised nobody mentioned this -
not exactly a rescue, but basically - the tower is unstable, nobody’s going up it to try and retrieve a body.
There’s the story about building the CPR, Canada’s first transcontinental railroad. The work through the Fraser canyon was difficult and dangerous, many deaths. One Chinese coolie fell to his death, and most of the workers felt it was too dangerous to go down and retrieve the body from the rocks on the river straight down 200 feet. The bosses offered a reward for anyone who would move the body, since the other workers were a little freaked out to have a dead friend just lying there in plain view. One enterprising coolie took the job - he tied several sticks of dynamite to a long rope, lowered it down the cliff to beside the body, and “Boom!” no more body on the rocks.
Alos, quite often you will hear of the rescuers / searchers (alpine climbers or helicopters) called back due to inclement weather - or even just darkness. They will try, but they aren’t going to kill a bunch of people trying.
See http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=757670 for a recent thread on exactly this topic.
It seems the consensus is
A) Fire Depts won’t rescue cats.
B) A lot more cats die up there, or die when they eventually fall out, than popular “wisdom” would suggest.
They weren’t ice divers, this was in the UK where water doesn’t freeze over that often. I assume they were in standard police diving gear and as for the time, it was surprisingly short but no, I’m probably not remembering it correctly.
Having been in Uncle Sam’s Confused Group myself, I’ve known quite a few respond with “That’s a bunch of horseshit” to that 'you have to go out, you don’t have to come back"
But since I was never in SAR, I don’t know how risky the odds have to be to refuse to go out. But I remember when Hurricane Gloria hit New York in 1985, that stations on south shore Long Island sent all their boats up the Hudson river. They weren’t going to try to rescue any damn fool civilians out boating in 145 mph winds.
Check out the book 3,000 degrees about the Worcester, MA cold storage warehouse fire. 6 FF died. The on scene commander physically blocked the doorway to prevent further futile rescue attempts. Now THAT was a tough call to make!