The Packraft Handbook by Luc Mehl

Author:Luc Mehl
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781680516036
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Published: 2021-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Wil Brown reaching for Heidi Halverson in training. Eagle River, Alaska.

Thor Tingey escaping carnage on the Grand Canyon section of the Colorado River.

Chapter 8

RIVER RESCUE FROM THE WATER

Setting safety and practicing river rescue techniques help to minimize the consequences when things go wrong in the water. Rivers are dynamic, and so are rescue systems, which fall along spectrums in terms of complexity, urgency, setting, and other variables.

Complexity: Rescue and recovery might be as simple as reaching an arm out to catch a swimmer or as complicated as setting up a zip-line to transfer equipment across the river.The top priority in any rescue effort is your safety.The next priorities are the other group members, the patient, and finally, the equipment. Different rescues expose rescuers to different levels of risk.

Urgency: A rescue may be urgent (e.g., extract a trapped swimmer) or non-urgent (e.g., transport an injured patient across the river). Urgent rescues require quick, and ideally premeditated, planning and implementation.Try very hard to make Plan A work, but anticipate adjusting to the evolving situation. In non-urgent rescues, if Plan A doesn’t work, you have time to try Plan B, C, and so on.

Setting: Rescues will often involve people in the water and on the shore. I’ve split the rescue content into a somewhat arbitrary division of these settings to make the length of the rescue discussion less intimidating.This chapter presents basic principles, communication, and what you can do from the water. The next chapter covers what you can do from the shore.

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