February 2008 Strut Systems Revolutionize Vehicle Stabilization by Lyn Bixby Something happened in the 1990s to spark a bit of a revolution in the field of vehicle extrication. A number of volunteer firefighters in different parts of the country began working independently of each other to build new tools to stabilize wrecked vehicles faster and more effectively with the idea of improving the chances for survival of patients, as well as the safety of the rescuers.
They developed an array of strut-related products that came to be known as tensioned buttress stabilization systems. Sales have grown considerably over the past decade, and prices range widely – from $400 to $10,000 and more – depending on the sophistication and variety of applications of the tools and the size of the kit.
Some struts are built with wood, while others telescope and are made from aluminum, steel and advanced composite materials. The two leading stabilization strut manufacturers – Res-Q-Jack and Rescue 42 – offer jacks with their systems.
The new tools led to the development of new rescue techniques – including lifting vehicles without the use of jacks.
Ron Moore, a battalion chief in the McKinney (Texas) Fire Department who has been teaching and writing about vehicle extrication for many years, calls the development of stabilization struts one of the most significant advances in vehicle rescue in 10 years.
“It is so radically different in how it improves responder safety and responder capabilities that there is no turning back,” he said. “If you are doing vehicle rescue in today’s real world, you must have some means of using a tensioned buttress stabilization system, a strut, or you really are not where you should be.”
Manufacturers of stabilization struts estimate less than half the fire departments in the United States have them.
Moore has support for that estimate. He said he was in California in December to conduct an advanced seminar with representatives of 18 fire departments in the Monterey-Carmel area. “They were using struts for the first time,” he said. “My experience as a trainer has been the rollout of strut capabilities among rescue squads and fire departments is still in its infancy.”
One of the earliest strut pioneers is Mike Schmidt, a municipal water works employee and volunteer firefighter in Glen Rock, Pa., who designed, built and sold the first commercial kit built specifically for vehicle stabilization in the mid-1990s.
He describes the concept this way: “All we’re doing is building triangles.”
His product, ZMAG Rescue ground pads, use 4-by-4 wood timbers to make struts. A kit is simple and inexpensive and has hardly changed over the past 12 years. It contains four pieces – two base plates with ratchet straps bolted to the bases and two tops. When it was introduced, it sold for $295, and the price today is $395.
“At 3 a.m. how much fumble factor does your average rescue crew really need, how many moving parts do you want to deal with?” asks Schmidt. “You want to throw something on the ground, the big square hole is where the big square piece of wood goes, and you’re done.”
Schmidt drew his inspiration from U.S. and Canadian competitions conducted by the Transportation Emergency Rescue Committee (TERC), which is where he first saw a team of firefighters use a tensioned buttress.
“It was basically a 4-by-4 that a team would buy at Home Depot, cut a taper on either end, bore a hole through it low, and they’d put a chain and a link through that hole,” he recalled. “Then they’d prop it against the car, hook up a one-ton cable come-along to the chain and wherever they could find an attachment point on the car and crank it tight. I stood back, and it was like, that’s pretty cool, it’s a triangle.”
Schmidt had created ZMAG in 1990 to produce a small pouch of hand tools for rescuers responding to motor vehicle accidents. He said his only thought in designing his ground pads was to stabilize a vehicle on its side.
Crazy Stuff “Since then we’ve done a lot of crazy stuff,” he said. “It’s to the point now, we can stabilize a vehicle in any position, on its roof or resting on another one.”
He said he has been to nearly 100 TERC rescue contests – “the most educational things I’ve ever been a part of” – and credits the participating teams with developing innovative uses of his tool. “They make me look good,” he said. “The teams perfected the tool, not me.”
One improvement he did make was producing steel couplings to join two 4-by-4s to increase the lengths of struts. The couplings sell for $40 a pair.
Sales of the ZMAG tool were brisk in the early days. “When I was the only guy, I couldn’t make them fast enough. Plus I made a tool that’s indestructible,” Schmidt said. “Now I’m not selling as many as I used to because of the competition.”
In the late 1990s, a little north of Pennsylvania in Spencer, N.Y., another volunteer firefighter got interested in improving extrication.
Cris Pasto, who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering, had created his own company, the Cepco Tool Company, in 1992 to produce the Bowrench Deck Tool, which he designed to install warped decking. He followed that up by inventing another tool, the QuikJack Hardwood Flooring Jack.
Frustration As Motivation About that time he became a volunteer firefighter and said he “took a liking to extrication.”
While responding to accidents as a firefighter, he said he found it difficult to try to stabilize a vehicle with 4-by-4s and rope. “I specifically remember a car we had over an embankment,” he said. “When I got on scene, it was so frustrating because we just didn’t have something to quickly do it.”
That got him thinking. No long afterward he went to extrication training and learned some new ways of using 4-by-4s to stabilize a car on its side.
“That was a lot better than what I was doing, but it was taking a long time too,” he said. “I thought there’s got to be a simpler way, and I realized that the hardwood flooring jack we make, which we use horizontally, could be stood up and pinch the car.”
He talked to the instructor, went back to his shop and a couple of months later had developed a tool. “I was just going to make equipment for our local department,” he said. “The word started spreading, and another neighboring department would want one and then we realized we were in the rescue business.”
He called his tool Res-Q-Jack and his first commercial model was the RJ-1, introduced in 1999. “The adjustable stands were simple real thin steel, extremely lightweight with a simple base and a pointed head,” he said. “They worked good, but then we needed end fittings that were more compatible with the vehicle.”
Catching Up To Customers Later versions of the tool were developed to make it more versatile and easier to use, to increase the setup speed and to give it a greater load capacity.
“I was told there was no way you could use equipment for stabilization as a lifting device,” Pasto recalled. “I was very new in the business, and I said, ‘OK, I can abide by that,’ and we would actually print in our early literature, not for lifting, for stabilization only.”
Then he said he went to a New York state chiefs show and firefighters from one department told him how they had used his equipment to lift a side-resting car off of a woman’s head.
“I said what would be the reason you can’t save a life and lift a car,’” he recalled. “We actually had to catch up to our customers.”
As he traveled, Pasto said he saw a need for developing what he calls “repeatable techniques” so firefighters could use the equipment as quickly and effectively as possible. He said his company was awarded a patent for a technique it developed to stabilize a roof-resting vehicle.
“We’re not replacing airbags and we’re not replacing hydraulic tools, but sometimes a different tool is the right tool for a particular job in terms of speed, efficiency and getting it done,” he said. .....Continued |
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