KatieTheKat

So, things have been a little quite on the firefighting update front, and there's a good reason for that!  Perhaps I should explain here..

My last post was about hover exit training, but what I didn't mention is that I nearly missed out on that altogether.  The night before, I was struck by intense pain in my lower back and right hip resulting in poor sleep and a lot of difficulty doing things like getting out of bed and putting on my shoes.  I decided to go ahead with hover exit training despite the pain since I didn't want to miss it and I don't think it made things any worse. 

Despite seeing some doctors and physios and such that weekend and in the following week, things didn't get much better so the decision was made that I would need to go on medical leave.  The rest of my team spent last week doing chainsaw training, and I didn't feel capable of participating due to muscle strain.

Instead of firefighting, I have spent the last week and a half learning what's involved in submitting a WCB claim (and I just found out mine was approved).  I've also been taking advantage of the time off to visit friends in Vancouver and family and goats and so on on the island.

The back is slowly healing.. I no longer need to brace myself too much for such activities as lying down/standing up/standing on my right leg/sneezing/etc.  I am starting to incorporate some strength-building exercises into my stretching/physio routine.  I hope to go back to work within a couple of weeks now.  The tough part is that I will have to pass the WFX-Fit test that I did to get into bootcamp to prove that I am fit for work again.  It will be interesting to see how it goes the second time around (it was pretty tough on the first go and I was only 20 seconds short of the 14min30sec cutoff time).

I hear that there has been a little bit of activity up at the base - last I spoke to my team, one of the crews was out looking for a reported smoke resulting from a lightning strike.  Hopefully I will be back in business by the time fire activity starts in earnest.

Things have been quiet on the blog front, but not so on the job front!

Last Friday we did helicopter hover exit and entry training.  There were some surprises for me:

1. When you're hover exiting a helicopter, you don't jump.



The key to a good hover exit or entry is a smooth and steady transfer of weight as close as possible to the helicopter's centre of gravity, as the pilot has to compensate for your movements at all times in order to keep the helicopter flying.  So when you're exiting, yes you have to move yourself out the door and lower yourself down until you're hanging by your arms.  But then you just hold on and let the pilot carefully lower the machine until your feet touch the ground.  At that point you smoothly and gently let go then duck yourself down just off to the side of the helicopter within the rotor disk while the rest of your team exits, one by one.  Once everyone is out (which for a well-trained 3-person crew should happen in 1-2 minutes), the helicopter will lift off and go back to your pre-arranged full landing site where it can pick up your gear on a long line and drop it in to your location.


2. You generally don't pass gear out of the helicopter when you hover exit.

Yes, you might bring a small pack or a chainsaw (to clear a better landing pad), and the first person out always carries a radio in case the helicopter has to abort and lift off suddenly.  But other than that gear is dealt with separately to the hover exiting process.  The goal is to minimize the time the helicopter is hovering, as it is a risky manoever.  Hovering means the pilot would not be able to use autorotation to his or her advantage should the engine fail and so such a problem would probably result in a bad crash.


3. When hover entering, the helicopter gets so low to the ground that you can put your knee onto the skid.


Again it's all about a smooth weight transition, and that's a lot easier if you put a knee up on the skid and slowly shift your weight from your standing leg onto the knee on the 'copter.  It's actually probably a little easier than doing a hover exit.  But it's a lot more rare since generally-speaking, there is less urgency to leaving a fire, you're already on the ground so normally you can clear or build a proper landing pad, and there tend to be more options to hike out to a better pickup point.

I will add another post with a video of ME hover exiting/entering once I get a copy of it but meanwhile here are a couple that I took of my fellow firefighters.