Texas EMS Magazine, Volume 19, Number 1, January/February 1998 Page: 11
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by a heavy-duty, steel-reinforced
cage. Directly behind this cage was a
second cage with two center-facing
bench seats: one seat holding two
prisoners, the other holding three.
These two seats were both in the same
type of cage described above; howev-
er, the victims had been thrown to the
floor like dice in a game of human
Yahtzee.
It was immediately clear that the
incident had multiple complications.
Number one was the helpless feeling
of the rescuers who had no equipment
to gain access to the victims in the van
until the rescue truck arrived on the
scene. Adding to that, all of the pris-
oners were wearing shackles and belly
chains, as well as being trapped in the
cages. The victims could not help
themselves or anyone else, nor could
they move off of the seriously injured
people.
Once the rescue truck arrived on
scene, another major question arose:
Where do we start? With only two
power plants to operate the hydraulic
equipment, so many critical patients
and the inability to triage, the deci-
sion-making process became less
based on initial assessment and more
on where we could do the most good
by gaining access to the most victims.
Once the rescue operations began,
we quickly gained access into the van
but were then confronted with the
security cages. Nobody in our depart-
ment had been trained on how to get
into these cages, and since the locking
mechanism had been destroyed by the
impact, the cage doors had to be
forced. Since the cages were made of
reinforced steel, there was no place to
get a bite with the spreaders. The sizeof the holes in the heavy duty chain
link caused the cutters to be ineffec-
tive, and with the proximity of the
victims, the rescuers saw this as far
too dangerous anyway.
With the overlapping nature of the
gates, we discovered that the only
way to force them open was to use
Halogen tools to manually spread the
support structure to get the tips of the
hydraulic spreaders far enough into
the gap to be effective. This maneuver
had to be done at the very top corner,
the weakest point, then worked down
to the actual locking mechanism. Once
at the lock, the spreaders needed to
be positioned to provide lateral force
to separate the locking pin from the
post, as opposed to attempting to
shear the locking pin. After the lock
had been disengaged, the door still
had to be forced open due to structur-
al damage. This process had to be
repeated to gain access into the sec-
ond cage.
We were then faced with the
extrication of five patients from the
rear cage, all of whom had been
unrestrained. We could immediately
see that the patient on the bottom of
this pile was unconscious. This made
everybody in the compartment a
candidate for rapid extrication, start-
ing from the top and working down.
Extrication was complicated due
to the shackles and belly chains, as
well as the small working space.
Placing a medic inside the van and
two outside the van, each patient was
fitted with a cervical collar and as
carefully as possible, untangled from
the others one by one and put onto
backboards. The primary consider-
ation was to stabilize the C-spineJanuary/February 1998 Texas EMS Magazine 11
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Texas. Department of State Health Services. Texas EMS Magazine, Volume 19, Number 1, January/February 1998, periodical, January 1998; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1507967/m1/11/?q=waco+tornado: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.