A COMPLEX TECHNICAL RESCUE IN A DEEP CAVE

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1 A COMPLEX TECHNICAL RESCUE IN A DEEP CAVE Presenters: Allen Padgett and Buddy Lane Ellison s Cave is located in Walker County which lies in the Northwest corner of Georgia. The cave extends through Pigeon Mountain with entrances on each side of the mountain. The cave is 12.2 miles long, 1,086 feet deep and remains a constant 56 degrees year round. There are underground streams and waterfalls, and several vertical drops which must be negotiated by ropes. The two special features of the cave are Fantastic Pit at 586 feet deep and Incredible Pit which is 440 feet deep. Both of these pits are freefall pits meaning that the walls of the pit are well away from the rope. The extensive cave between these two massive natural shafts is difficult to traverse and consists of five separate levels. The cave has been explored by about 350 to 400 people each year since 1968 when it was originally discovered by serious cavers and surveyed. There have been six previous rescues in the cave two of which resulted in fatalities. Until this incident there had been no rescues from the middle of the mountain as all previous rescues were in association with the vertical pits near the entrances. Caves are naturally occurring openings in the earth as opposed to mines which are man made. There are caves in every state except Rhode Island. While there are many who enter caves for adventure, a real caver is experienced, equipped, skilled and organized. The National Speleological Society (NSS) ( is 10,000 members strong and is the voice for serious cavers in the US. The National Cave Rescue Commission (NCRC) is an organizational part of the NSS. This commission is tasked with training cave rescue resources and does so with a yearly week long national seminar, and numerous regional training events. They are also tasked with coordinating cave rescue resources on a regional and national basis. They keep a data base of teams, specialized gear and trained resources. The NCRC is not a cave rescue team but they are a vital part of making a successful cave rescue possible. On Sunday May 26, 2013 eight experienced cavers entered Ellison s cave. Four entered on the East side of the mountain at the New Entrance and four entered the Stairstep Entrance on the West side. Their plan was to crossover, that is the two groups would meet each other as they traversed the cave in opposite directions. 1

2 The groups met in the middle of the mountain and exchanged stories of their descent into the cave. They soon parted and each group headed toward their exits. The group exiting to the East was traversing the uppermost level, in the bottom cave. They were just past a place called the Popcorn Passage when they came to a rather difficult climb around some large boulders. A short hand line was rigged here to aid in the traverse around the rock. Three members of the group had passed the traverse and Dwight Kempf was the last. The three ahead heard a loud crash then the sound of sliding gravel, then total and absolute silence. They called out to Dwight but received no response. Dwight had apparently fallen down a scree slope then slid out of sight over an edge down a 20 foot pit. There was no obvious way to climb down to investigate. The time was around 4 p.m. The group decided that the trip leader would head towards the entrance to call for rescue. The other two would attempt to find a bypass to the pit and climb down to locate Dwight. The party split up at this point not knowing where Dwight was and what condition he was in. After about 20 minutes of careful checking, the two party members finally found a way down and reached Dwight. They were surprised to find him sitting on some small rocks. On closer inspection however they found that he was bleeding from a bad head laceration, had a swollen face, and his left leg was obviously broken which had created a large open wound which was bleeding badly. His friends were able to stop the blood loss and cared for him using what they had with them to comfort their friend and settled in to await rescue. Dwight told them that he had been knocked unconscious for minutes. 2

3 When the trip leader finally reached the entrance after a stressful two hour solo trip, he called Walker County 911 from a cell phone borrowed from one of the trip members still in the cave. Rescue was paged at 6:01 p.m. The 911 dispatcher directed the trip leader to walk off the mountain to the Blue Hole, a spring resurgence for the cave with a parking lot which later became the rescue Incident Command Post. On his way down the mountain, cave rescue leaders spoke with him via cell phone and then met him at the Blue Hole at 6:32 p.m. With cave rescuers now on the scene and aware of the situation, the enormity set in. The Fire Rescue supervisor appointed the Cave Team Captain as Incident Commander. Many challenges presented themselves: PROBLEM 1: How to get enough trained help? It was a Sunday evening on a holiday weekend. Walker County Fire Rescue has a volunteer Cave Rescue team and they had been paged immediately. There were about 10 local volunteers available and about 6 paid firefighters who were also cavers and trained cave rescuers. This rescue was going to take far more than that. Literally, within the first minutes a mutual aid call went out to Chattanooga Hamilton County Rescue Service, Cave/Cliff Unit. Resource calls specified send only cave rescue trained personnel, familiar with Ellison s Cave. Additional resource call outs went to the Huntsville Cave Rescue Unit, and NCRC trained cave rescue resources from the Atlanta area. The Knoxville Volunteer Emergency Rescue Squad, Cave Rescue Team was called and asked to delay their response until the next morning when they would be needed. Help was on the way and coming from every direction. PROBLEM 2: How to support this operation? There were going to be a LOT of people coming and this rescue was going to last a long time (24 hours +). Immediate orders for the Command Bus, the Food/Rehab Bus, and at least 4 portable toilets were made. Check In was established. Two large whiteboards were used to prepare a visual briefing and were updated throughout the incident. 3

4 The Incident Base was at the end of a mile long narrow gravel road in a small trail head parking lot. Space was going to be a problem so a nearby staging area was established with a shuttle service to base. PROBLEM 3: How do we find the obscure patient location? The accident location was off the main route most people use to traverse the lower cave. The reporting party was exhausted by his eventful trip and also by the previous day s trip into the cave. It was decided it would be unsafe to send him back in as fatigued as he was. The bottom cave has about ten miles of passages in five different levels with a multitude of obscure passages to confuse even experienced cavers. Rescuers not familiar with the exact passage could spend hours or days wandering about the bottom cave looking for the patient. Two rescuers in route were very familiar with the passage so the initial response was delayed slightly waiting on the guides. PROBLEM 4: How do we move all these people and all of this equipment to the cave entrance? If you walk up the trail it is exactly one mile with a 1000 ft. elevation gain and it takes about 40 minutes. There is a slightly longer fire break/jeep trail that goes to the entrance. Travel on this track by multi passenger four wheel drive UTV takes about 25 minutes, one way. Three of these UTV s were brought in. Use of Jeeps or 4x4 trucks on this so called road would have quickly rendered it impassable for any vehicle. The foot trail was marked for night and day traffic as were the turns in the jeep track. PROBLEM 5: What tasks need to be addressed in this operation?. As with any incident the standard ICS package worked. (Command, Planning, Operations, Logistics, 4

5 Finance/Administration). One special task was Entrance Control where everyone entering or exiting the cave was carefully tracked. Below ground operations used a standard Task Force model that is taught in all the cave rescue classes and is well understood by responders. The Underground Task Forces are: Initial Response TF. (Go to patient, assess, stabilize and report). Communications TF (set up the wired telephone network). Rigging TF (do any technical rigging required). Medical TF (provide long term patient care). Evacuation TF (provide the grunt labor to move patient). Transportation TF (the Sherpa s who carry all that heavy gear into and out of the cave). There can be numerous Task Forces of the same type at different locations. (Rigging TF 1,2,3,4) Once a TF finishes their job they may be shifted to another task force that needs additional manpower. PROBLEM 6: Patient Care Given the initial Information it was not known if the patient was alive or dead. Luckily, he was alive when contact was made, but that created a whole host of problems. The patient presented with a femur fracture with significant blood loss now controlled, a head injury that resulted in unconsciousness for a reported minutes, there was mechanism of injury to the spine from a significant fall. His caving partners had kept him from becoming hypothermic but his blood pressure was dangerously low. He was in a lot of pain. The medics administered IV fluids, pain medications, and antibiotics. The femur fracture presented a problem as the IRTF does not normally carry a femur traction splint. They had to call out for one to be brought in all the way from incident base (a Sherpa priority task!). Later during the evacuation they administered additional pain meds, more antibiotics, anti seizure medications and one unit of whole blood. The transfusion site was in a low stream passage between obstacles in the bottom cave. Getting whole blood to a patient not in a hospital involves a multitude of problems. We had doctor s orders, we had the necessary equipment on scene with the patient to deliver it. We had the blood available, the real difficulty was time. Whole blood must be given within a 4 hour window and preferably under two hours to lessen chances of clotting causing a stroke. We flew the blood to the base, rode it up the mountain quickly and handed it off to a young rescuer who literally ran through the cave to deliver it in time to use. We made the two hour window just barely. The patient was packaged in an exposure bag with an Oregon Spine Splint and carried in a SKED litter from the accident site to the bottom of the big pit where he was moved to a Ferno Washington plastic basket litter. At times the patient became combative as a result of the head injury making care even more difficult. This condition was resolved by the administration of additional medications. The medical team had critical patient care non stop for 14 hours. PROBLEM 7: Patient Movement. The goal in any rescue is steady movement of the patient toward the entrance with no delays. The problem in achieving this goal is the shape of the litter and the shape of the cave. Between Dwight and daylight were several vast chambers but also tight places and sharp bends between the rocks. Even in easy passages moving a litter through a cave can be problematic. Uneven rock strewn floors are common, low ceilings, and 90 degree bends between rocks are commonplace. Fragile cave formations must be protected. Also in Ellisons every rescuer sent below any vertical drop was committed to a long climb out and would be unavailable to assist with patient movement above the drop. Below Fantastic Pit there are two serious tight places. The first is a breakdown pile, a stack of large boulders that 5

6 lead down to the stream bed. The way out descends on a route that winds in and out between the rocks. There is a well known 90 degree bend in this stack difficult even for healthy cavers. Knowledgeable cavers remember that there are possible bypasses to this route that avoid the 90 degree bend. Aat the bottom there is a low stream passage that must be negotiated. This is the lowest level of the cave and is only 3 feet high, 8 feet wide with a bold creek flowing over the gravel floor. The next obstacle is the chute leading up into TAG Hall near the bottom of Fantastic Pit. The chute is a tilted V slot about feet tall, easily traversed by a caver. The problem was that gravity pulled the litter into the tighter V. It is extremely tight and for the patient it is what we call a nose scratcher. The tight crevice only allowed for two people to move the litter, one above and one below. The top man rigged a lightweight Jigger Rig ( a 4:1 block and tackle of 7mm cord). The litter reached the tightest place when the lower rescuer stood on a buddy s shoulders pushing the foot of the litter. The litter got stuck to a point where it would not go up or down. In a moment of frustration after many attempts to free the litter, the lower man shook the SKED hard which dislodged it upward. With more shaking they got the litter through finally and soon reached the bottom of Fantastic Pit. PROBLEM 8: Fantastic Pit. It is a 586 foot free drop with an adjacent waterfall. It is a vast chamber with the bottom being as large as several basketball courts. The sound of the waterfall and voices echo off of the sculpted walls. The top of the pit is a small alcove with a low ceiling which is called The Attic. The standard rig points in the Attic are two anchor bolts placed in the ceiling so that the rope hangs free into the pit. All rigging is based on the concept that the rescue load will ALWAYS be a single person load. If the patient requires an attendant they will ascend a parallel line adjacent to the patient. In the big pit there is a very real possibility of lines getting tangled in the free space and jamming up the system, so any ropes must be offset. For this reason a separate belay line on the patient was not utilized. The rigging plan was to utilize a counterbalance system to bring the litter up, simply put; build an elevator. To offset the Up rope and the Down rope a directional was placed at the Balcony rig point which is offset slightly and 60 feet below the Attic rig point. A fixed line to the bottom was rigged here. The two people selected to be the counterbalance weight were tethered to each other and a single rappel rack was rigged on the fixed line. The haul line was passed through a pulley at the top of the Attic with a prusik hitch on the load side to capture progress. The haul line was then directed down to the counterbalance weight where it was tied off to them. At the bottom the patient was attached in a vertical orientation. The two counterbalance weights went down as the litter came up. However the weights had started 76 feet below the attic. When the weights began their rappel they had to descend at least 14 feet to overcome the elongation in the nearly 700 feet of low stretch rope between them and the litter. When they reached the pit floor the litter was still 90 feet from the top. A 3: 1 haul system had been rigged and was now attached to the haul line and the litter was hauled up the last 90 feet. When the litter reached the ceiling pulley the litter orientation was changed from vertical to horizontal in order to clear rock projections at the top of the pit. Belay lines were added from both sides and then a cross pit line to this pulley was released through a rappel device which allowed the litter to move out of free space towards the haul team where the litter simply landed on the floor of the attic. The total time involved for the haul was about twenty five minutes. 6

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8 PROBLEM 9: Traverse to Warm Up Pit Bottom. The first movement away from Fantastic Pit is along a narrow ledge around the top of the drop. The litter was belayed from across the pit and tag lines moved it along. Several more fixed lines were used to move the litter and secure rescuers along a narrow canyon to the top of the 30 foot Nuisance Drop where a top brake lower was utilized to move the patient into the bottom of the Warm Up Pit. PROBLEM 10: The Warm Up Pit. This pit is a 125 foot drop with an adjacent waterfall. A 3:1 haul was rigged at the top using two ceiling bolts as a redirectional anchor. This allowed the haul team to utilize a cave passage with more room to work for the haul. The pit has about 30 feet of nasty slope at the top that requires edge tenders on fixed lines to move the litter up and over. Tag lines were utilized near the bottom to keep the litter from swinging into the waterfall. The litter came up in a vertical orientation. 8

9 PROBLEM 11: The Stream Passage to the Entrance. From the top of the Warm Up Pit the litter was moved down a slope to the stream passage that leads steadily upward to the entrance about 1500 feet away. The stream passage named The Ecstasy is about feet wide, 10 to 15 feet tall with a rushing stream over slick rocks and boulders. The litter was passed along a large caterpillar like line of rescuers and quickly moved forward slowing somewhat as rescuers repositioned in front of the line. The entrance is a relatively simple slope that presented few problems for the litter passing. The patient exited the cave at 12:30 pm, 17 hours after the 911 call. PROBLEM 12: Getting the Patient off the Mountain. A 4x4 Chevy Suburban was brought to the entrance by a circuitous route on the far side of the mountain driving for about an hour on gravel roads and then down the upper part of the Jeep road/firebreak. This vehicle would be utilized to transport the patient down the mountain road to the helicopter LZ. Two partially inflated bean bag full body splints were placed under the litter for additional shock absorption on the bumpy ride. The patient s condition was deteriorating as they descended the mountain. At the LZ the patient was first loaded into a waiting ambulance and intubated. He was then flown by Life Force to Erlanger Hospital a Level 1 trauma center in nearby Chattanooga, TN. PROBLEM 13: Get all of the Rescuers and Gear Out of the Cave. When the patient exited the cave there were still 42 people in the cave and 12 of them still had to climb the 586 foot deep, Fantastic Pit. Fresh crews were staged to move the mountains of gear. The crews who were the first to enter the cave, exited safely many hours later. It was an additional six hours before all were out. The muddy gear was piled into two 4x4 pickups and people were transported by UTV or walked down the trail. Two of the UTV s went down for mechanical reasons due to the rough terrain and heavy loads. At the ICP massive amounts of muddy gear was sorted, then hauled back to rescue stations to be cleaned and decontaminated as Ellison s Cave is a positive site for a deadly bat fungus (WNS). Everything used in the cave rescue not only had to be cleaned to get the mud off, but it must undergo a decontamination process to ensure the fungus is not spread. THE LESSON LEARNED: IF A ROPE IS NEEDED ON A TRAVERSE OR CLIMB, ONE SHOULD ALWAYS BE ATTACHED TO THE ROPE. THE OUTCOME: A Life Was Saved. For the patient, Dwight, there was a long road to recovery. First there was the trauma unit, then surgery, ICU for a week all in Chattanooga, and then a special rehab hospital in Atlanta for weeks. He was finally able to return home to Pennsylvania just over a month after the accident. Four months after the accident he walked his daughter down the aisle at her wedding. You can t get any better than that. All of that training, all of that practice, all of that expensive gear, all of that commitment by volunteers paid off in a life saved. We have never been so proud. This is why we all do what we do. Technical rescue is cool but in reality it is all about saving lives. 9

10 Photo of Dwight Kempf and daughter Caitlin. 10

11 Thanks to Bruce Smith and Don Hunter for illustrations and to Ron Miller and Karen Padgett for manuscript review and first hand input. 11

NCRC Instructor Recertification Practice Questions

NCRC Instructor Recertification Practice Questions Policy 1. Explain the role of an NCRC instructor in a real rescue incident NOT associated with an NCRC training event. 2. Describe the 2 tiers of the NCRC organizational structure, and describe 3 key responsibilities