On a cold morning Sunday, members of the Peterborough and Jaffrey fire departments gathered on the shore of Cunningham Pond in Peterborough and took turns rescuing each other from the freezing water.
The rescues were part of Peterborough Fire and Rescue’s ongoing training, something Chief Ed Walker said happens every season, and every year.
“There are a lot of things that we need to stay current in,” he said.
Training follows an annual cycle, with practice handling brush fires happening in the spring before brush fire season in the summer, for example. Ideally, the department’s training for ice rescues would happen before they became more seasonally likely to occur, but they need the pond to be iced over before they can practice.
The procedure for rescuing somebody who has fallen through ice is relatively simple – a firefighter dons a protective insulating suit and a technical rescue helmet, and pushes a rescue sled across the ice to the open water where the victim has fallen. The sled, which is new for the department as of two days before the training, has two separate pontoons for the firefighter to balance on while pulling the victim up into the middle of the sled. When that is done, the two are then pulled back to shore via ropes manned by other personnel.
“They make it look easy, but it’s not,” said Deputy Chief Brian Wall while he observed members of the department practicing the maneuver. It can be especially tricky in a real-world scenario, he said, if the victim is panicking and subsequently tries to pull the rescuer down.
Members of both the Peterborough and Jaffrey departments practiced the drill, which Walker said was for efficiency, as the process of cutting holes into the ice and otherwise getting the training set up was time-consuming and logistically hard. But in addition, he said it was because the two departments work together regularly, as when a call goes out in either town, the other automatically responds.
“If there’s a serious accident, Jaffrey is the one we call,” he said.
The training also provided members of the two departments a chance to meet and help facilitate that relationship, if they hadn’t met previously.
“It’s an opportunity for our two departments to get together, see each other, get to know each other, increase our general level of confidence in each other,” Walker said.
Members of the Peterborough Police Department were also in attendance, as Wall said that they might be called upon to oversee the rope portion of the maneuver if the fire department is low on manpower.
Walker said that while it might not be intuitive to some that firefighters practice cold-weather rescues like this, it’s very necessary.
“We’ve been very fortunate; we don’t get a lot of ice rescues in Peterborough,” he said. “It’s what we refer to as a low-frequency, high-stakes event. It doesn’t happen that often, but you’ve got to be able to get it right. You don’t get a redo.”
“The odds are pretty good,” Wall said. “We’ve got a lot of bodies of water around here.”
What it comes down to, according to Walker, is that it’s best to be prepared.
“The old adage is that if you don’t know who else to call, you call the fire department,” he said.