LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX 18) — As first responders continue their work at the site of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore, local firefighters in Kentucky are watching closely to see what lessons they might learn from the incident.
"It's just something that you wouldn't even imagine to happen. I would say there was a lot of panic and chaos, and then you have the survivors who didn't go in and witnessed it firsthand and are now feeding information," said District Chief Justin Dee of the Lexington Fire Department.
The department's dive team has performed missions like trying to rescue people or recover cars that crashed into the Kentucky River. Dee says the height of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore means anyone on that bridge deck would have been in a horrifying situation.
"The big concern is the distance to the water initially, 187 feet or whatever that was to the water, is going to be tragic," Dee said.
Captain Ben Runnels said even if people survived the initial fall, there were still tough conditions in the water.
"They're going to be dealing with currents within the Chesapeake Bay, Chesapeake River, they're going to be dealing with temperatures in the water that could be somewhere between 40 and 50 degrees, so hypothermia is a real risk especially with a prolonged dive operation," Runnels said.
When Lexington firefighters arrive on the scene of a water rescue, they make a few judgments about the safety of the scene and what risks they're willing to accept.
"We treat the first 60 minutes as a rescue, which means that we're going to be giving everything we have. We're going to be, not disregarding safety, but we're going to be pushing to our limit of what we accept as safe to get into the space and try to effect rescues," Runnels said.
After that, with some exceptions, they move to a more methodical recovery mode.
"Recovery mode is just a slower operation. We build in many more degrees of safety for our divers. That way, we can make sure that everybody's going to go home safe that day," Runnels said.
Huge incidents like this one will likely teach first responders new lessons about how to optimize their responses. The successful rescue of a driver dangling in a truck off a Louisville bridge is one of those scenarios.
"That caused some discussion and this will too - how we're going to prepare for this, what kind of things we're going to do in training going forward to evaluate the situation, how we can be better-prepared, whether it be equipment or just training on hand," Dee said.
