like this
is the most dangerous scary situation
that we can encounter
you can drop that around you wrap it
around you
get it hold it right there
if you find yourself taking a swim that
you didn't necessarily want to take a
lot of things can happen
the spectrum runs from you might just
slow yourself down and ruin your day
all the way to you know death
swift water safety institute is a
professional training organization
swift water is defined by the national
fire protection association as
water that's actually moving at a rate
greater than 1.15 miles per hour
hang on hang on guys we're almost there
we've got three days action-packed
a class full of students training for
river rescues
we'll train us military special forces
we'll train fire departments ems
personnel police and fire
commercial river guides we train
recreational river users
my name is rich nichols and i'm from
west jordan utah in
2020 i found myself unemployed i'm at a
point in my life
where to restart something over is a
little challenging
if there's one positive thing that
happened to me out of this
it gave me some new direction i decided
i wanted to get into some guiding
[Applause]
[Music]
this morning we're at big bend
campground here on the colorado river
it's just about seven miles upstream
from moab
today's training is mainly focused on
being
in the water so self-rescue
and buddy rescue
we're going to do what we call an
adventure swim
so work on our body positioning while
we're in the water work on what's safe
what's acceptable and what's not so the
the ideal way for a swift water entry
move or you know the way that you're
gonna jump into a water
you want your pfd which is the life
jacket to hit the water first
gonna keep your arms crossed up in front
of your face as you're you're jumping
into the water and trying to
kind of skip out into the rapid a little
bit
we're going to introduce some ropes in
the form of throw bags i would
consider the throw bag to be the most
basic rescue device a throw bag is
simply a bag
and inside of it is a length of floating
rope you would throw
that bag of rope to somebody hopefully
landing really on them or very near to
them
they would grab that and now we have a
connection
between ourselves and that that person
in the water
where we can swing them into shore
thank you
you know if you go out there you you
have your throw bag but you
you know haven't been practicing you
throw and you miss you haven't helped
the situation at all you might have made
it more dangerous
secondary
you have an opportunity to fail and
people to support you to fail
i definitely failed a couple times
throwing the throwback but then i also
like
got it
i need a rope for something one two
three
we're going to be working on how to
extricate someone who
may have caught a foot in the river and
become entrapped
a food entrapment scenario like this is
the most dangerous
scary situation that we can encounter
into a fighter rescue because you've got
a person out there with a compromised or
no airway whatsoever
so you have seconds or minutes to
establish an airway and save that
person's life get hold of my stronger
what am i doing
hold on my foot's still caught never
ever put your feet down to moving water
if you're not in control
that's how this situation gets out of
control is when you put your feet down
on the bottom of the river you get
jammed between two rocks or under a rock
and then we have a real life scenario
and that's terrifying
okay try to bring him in trying to bring
somebody helping
it was a little bit too aggressive uh
water for him
so we decided that what we'd do is we'd
set a human wedge up in front of that
particular person
to give a water break we got our six
person wedge
we may add two people in the back
they're going to act as rescuers
i had no idea just the amount of
physical exertion it was going to take
just on that front person to be at the
front of that wedge
you definitely want a bigger person but
you also want a physically fit person
that's going to be able to be able to
kind of muscle against that current
we're gonna have a river trip about
eight mile river trip what that allows
us to do
is to get out there and and flip some of
these big rafts over
and practice riding those and the
techniques involved with that
so we had you know kind of mayhem in the
water we had eight different people in
the water eight different paddles
we took our paddles and stuck them under
the uh gig line
and then pulled pulled back to reset the
raft upright in the water and then
a couple of people were able to get in
other people were attempting to get in
as well
the people that were already in the raft
were helping those people get in it's a
pretty chaotic situation
so we want to just kind of make that a
little bit more static and make some of
those decisions easier and get give them
somewhat of a format to follow
while they're flipping this boat
here we're going to build a tension
diagonal and that's going to be used to
to move gear or people across the river
there you go
uh we're gonna be working on some some
knots so we're gonna set up
our our three uh three to one mechanical
advantage just to gain a little bit of
a little bit of force one of the
specific knots we'll be teaching them
is this double fisherman's on a bend and
then you pull it together
it's used to join two ropes but mainly
to create a preset loop
you kind of drape that cord over a line
and it wraps like three times and then
pulls tight it's a friction hitch
so that when it's under tension it it
bites down on another
on another line and we can pull it in a
couple different directions
when we don't have tension on it we can
loosen it
and slide it either direction up or down
that line that we're connecting to say i
were alone
and i can pull on a rope with a hundred
pounds
of force through a mechanical advantage
system
uh i can generate a larger force
three set the break we're going to clip
that pressing loop with the carabiner
onto that rope you know we're gonna walk
out as far as we can we're not even
gonna be clipping in to like down by
that wave down there
and then it's gonna be left shoulder
just like this it's gonna set your body
a little weird
you're gonna feel sideways to the
current it's gonna help push you across
try to keep your whole body on the
downstream side of this rope
we're going to teach students how to
deploy with what's called a live bait
tether
so they can be tethered onto their life
jacket with the rope and actually go
swimming after somebody it's all
patience
all patience okay wait wait for it wait
for it wait for it
sneak out there waves okay now
get going
doing the live bait recoveries uh it was
challenging uh you had a swimmer that
was out in
some swift water moving past you and you
needed to get to them
and drag them back in as quickly as
possible
when you come into this class as is any
level of user
you're going to walk away with a more
developed skill set than you showed up
with and
we see that from a lot of folks they
just go i had no idea i didn't know that
[Music]
quite a few people probably five to six
thousand students have gone through our
training program
and those are the same students that
work as river rangers
um they get jobs working for search and
rescue units
that end up going to the military that
work for the coast guard well rich i
know you're just starting off on a
new little adventure here so i hope this
was a great way to kick it so i found a
guiding job
here in moab i'm doing a solid for a
full year and this training
is going to be able to help me in making
proper decisions
when i'm out on the water and keep
myself and my guests
safe at the same time
[Applause]
you