AUBURN - It may have been a training exercise, but for members of the Auburn Fire Department, the threat of a secondary collapse was real as they attempted to rescue a victim who was trapped in a trench more than eight-feet deep.

“The only way it gets more realistic than this is if we really had a real person trapped down there,” said Dan Schneider, an instructor from the state Office of Fire Prevention and Control, who was helping to teach the local firefighters how to safely execute trench rescues.

The firefighters learned how to safely account for factors such as weather, confined space and the possibility of a secondary collapse, which could trap rescue workers who were attempting to get to the victim.

Instructor Pete Rizzo said the training was an important aspect of every firefighter's job because of the changing nature of their responsibilities.

“Firefighters are no longer only responding to fires,” he said. “They do elevator rescues, accidents, and medical calls. Some of these skills cross over to other types of situations. If we don't constantly train to keep them sharp we lose them.”

With more people doing their own major yard renovations, and with increased construction and road work, which may require digging, emergency workers have had to respond to more calls to rescue people who became trapped when the earth around them collapsed, Rizzo said.

And with a cubic foot of dirt weighing nearly 100 pounds, a victim could have as much as 6,500 pounds of dirt crashing down on top of them.

“With that much weight, it's usually not a good survival rate,” said Schneider, who is also a firefighter in New York City. “The (trench) rescues I have gone to have had a survival rate of about 65 percent, and that is mostly due to luck.”

Jeff Dygert, a member of the AFD and an instructor with the OFPC, said the rescue workers were taught how to brace the trench walls with the available supplies in order to ensure the safety of the victim and other firefighters.

Instead of using modern pneumatic struts to brace the trench walls, which are often too expensive for smaller departments to afford, Dygert said, the firefighters used small wooden braces, which can hold up to 8,000 pounds, and larger braces, which could hold 20,000 pounds.

“We will keep trying to acquire the good tools like the pneumatic lifts so we can do this kind of rescue quicker, but until then this is what we have to use,” he said.

The department would also be investing into equipping a truck with the needed rescue equipment, including wood and carpentry tools, to ensure firefighters always had the appropriate resources when they responded to a call, Dygert said.

Despite not having the most modern technology, and having to stop the training to respond to two separate alarms, which occasionally left the remaining workers short staffed, Schneider said he was impressed with what he saw.

“We got down in there in two hours despite the runs and lunch,” he said. “That's a good time even if we used pneumatic struts. You guys were banging out on all cylinders. You did a good job today and you should all be proud of yourselves.”

Staff writer Nate Robson can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 248 or nathan.robson@lee.net