I can say, with a great deal of thankfulness, that I’ve never been in a serious car accident.

As such, I’ve never been in a situation responders have needed to use the jaws of life on a car that I’ve been in. The latter changed on Thursday night.

Dozens of firefighters from several of Oktibbeha County’s volunteer fire departments gathered at the Central Oktibbeha Volunteer Fire Department station in Longview in the evening for extrication training. Training Officer Austin Check said the exercises were the conclusion of a State Fire Academy 12-hour course that teaches firemen how to remove victims from vehicles after accidents.

“The goal is to get the patient out as quickly as possible and get them to a higher level of care,” Check said. “The ‘do’ (for the exercise) is everything we do is for the patient. ‘The don’t’ is don’t forget about safety. We can’t help anybody if we’re hurting ourselves or hurting the patient. We’re going to it as quickly as possible and in the safest way possible.”

Check said about 80 percent of the departments’ calls are for medical responses. He said about 10 percent are for car accidents, and structure and grass/woods fires make up about five percent each.

Firefighters worked through the night at several stations, one of which saw a team using hydraulic tools to slowly raise a flipped-over car enough so that a patient, if one had been pinned underneath, could be removed. At another station, firefighters practiced removing a wounded patient from a car and loading them onto a stretcher for transit to a hospital.

At a third station, volunteer firefighter Alunte’ Tate, who is a student at East Mississippi Community College and has volunteered for about eight months, worked to pry the door off a wrecked SUV.

“You have to get the tip of the spreader in between the hinges and bust the door open,” Tate said. “The machine can get pretty heavy.”

“It’s pretty intense,” he later added. “It’s a great experience.”

The experience

The exercise I participated in put me in the driver’s seat of a busted Hyundai, wearing a firefighter’s jacket to protect against broken glass with a sheet over my head both for protection and to simulate disorientation a victim might feel after an accident.

My partner for the exercise — Michelle Winfield, who works at OCH Regional Medical Center’s breast care center and has been a part of the Maben Fire Department for about a month — eased into the back seat to take on the role of keeping me calm while the team worked to pry the door off after whatever misfortune befell my car got it stuck shut.

“You know,” she said as we waited for the exercise to begin, “this is the first time I’ve done this.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Mine too.”

Once the exercise began the team, led by Starkville Fire Chief Charles Yarbrough, was efficient. It was hard to tell what was going on, with the sheet reducing my visibility of everything to a fog of hazy lights and shadows as firefighters moved around the wreck. There was a scraping sound as they pulled the broken windshield out of the car and staccato pops as they broke out the windows near Winfield and myself.

All the while, she kept a steady conversation going, asking if I could breath all right and if I was feeling any pain, and also general chitchatting with me about our day-to-day lives.

“They’re about to put the spreader in,” she said as the team readied the jaws of life. “It’s gonna be loud, OK?”

She wasn’t wrong. A series of booms shook the car and I wondered aloud if the firefighters were hitting something with a hammer. Winfield said it was the team inserting the jaws of life to get the door open.

The hinges sounded like oversized kernels of popcorn popping as the jaws prided them apart, with loud bangs as they failed.

Next thing I knew, I was standing outside the car — which was now short a door. I don’t know exactly how long it took. It wasn’t more than a few quick minutes.

Shadrick Hogan, Emergency Medical Service assistant director at OCH Regional Medical Center and a paramedic with 20 years of experience, said that a quick response is crucial in accident responses.

“There’s always this thing called the ‘golden hour,'” Hogan said. “We need to make sure we get this patient out to an emergency room on an operating table within an hour.”

Check said quick extrication is also important because it helps with getting a patient medically evaluated.

“Especially with trauma, there’s only so much you can do when someone is in a car,” he said. “We need to be able to look at them in their entirety, and when they’re stuck in a car there’s less time to do other things.”

Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.

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