extrication

It's been a quiet, relaxing weekend for me after a hectic, worrisome week. We started off with a bang on Monday night during firefighter training. Our one and only power spreader broke. We have a small hand spreader that we keep as a back up, but when you're faced with a person trapped inside a twisted tornado of steel, it's nice to have the extra speed and power that a heavy hydraulic spreader gives.

As I've mentioned before, we are far from help, so my first priority was to try and track down a replacement spreader. I spent the week on the phone calling people in Dayton, Montreal, Gravenhurst, and Williamstown. I followed leads on several used spreaders, and discovered that ours was going to take at least a month to get back in service. On Thursday, I secured a good hand spreader on loan that is much stronger than ours. On Friday, I got the loan of a complete set of Hurst tools from our good friends at the Fire College. Our tools are made by Amkus, and are basically the same as the Hurst tools, except that Hurst has a copyright on the famous name: Jaws of Life. If you ever get a chance to watch a crew tear apart a car limb by limb with these amazing machines, do it. Here is a training video that gives you an idea of how they work.

If nothing else, it will give you an incentive to drive safely. Extrication is ugly business.

Erinn and I celebrated 16 years of marriage this weekend. A great way to end a stressful week.