Cold Weather Survival: Firestarting & Tinderbox

Winter has officially arrived in Minnesota. I just had an educational CCDC/CERT training session on cold water survival and hypothermia response.

A few ice safety take-aways:

Ice is never safe because of springs and fish activity. It's not necessarily a uniform consistency all over, so depth of ice varies.

Wear a PFD if you go out on the water.

Slush is always a bad sign. NEVER drive a car or truck out on the ice.

Snow mobiles actually exert less pressure per square inch on the ground than a human being. I think this is also true for a person wearing skis.

If someone is suffering from hypothermia, be sure to warm them up slowly. Getting them too warm too fast can result in cold blood shocking the heart and stopping it.

Carry a rope in your car to throw to people who've broken through the ice. (A small weight on one end with a hand loop is great too.)

Never go out on broke ice to "rescue" someone unless you've special training. You'll end up in the drink yourself.

If you don't have a rope, a ladder also works.

Firestarting

Another piece of advice the speaker offered offered was to carry some firestarter.

I'm not good at starting fires, so I struggle with this issue.

Kit Up has an excellent discussion of firestarting titled Lord of the Flame.

This is my current approach:

I use an empty vitamin bottle as a tinderbox. I added some cotton balls (with a dab of vaseline each) to the bottle. I then taped it to a plastic wallet on a lanyard.

The wallet is reinforced with duct tape. Duct tape is handy in an emergency, after all.

The wallet has a lighter, a multi-tool & Swedish Fire Steel in it. See Gear Junkie for a description of Swedish Firesteel.

A plain cigarette lighter at least has a piece of steel and tinder. I like the FireSteel as a backup, but I'm a safety geek...

Add some tinder (dryer lint, fat wood, twigs, grass, paper, char...) and you've a fire making pouch, aka tinderbox. A small candle rocks for light and heat generation. Tea lights, votive candles, candles also come in tins...

The duct tape on my fire making pouch is safety orange, so it's easy for me to find and retain my tinderbox.

Magnesium sticks sound good in theory, but I'm hesitant to use a knife so close to my fingers when I'm freezing to death. The bits of magnesium dust also blow away easily and it's not easy to get the spark strip to work when it's below freezing. (This I've tried.)

Here's a proposition that I've considered, but I would welcome feedback.

Starting a fire is difficult, especially in a strong wind.

In a life or death situation (with the wind blowing 50 mph), you could attach your tinder to a strip of duct tape to hold it in place long enough to get a spark on it. Otherwise tinder is easily blown away.

The downside to the duct tape method is burning a small piece of plastic in the duct tape, which is bad for the environment.

Other suggestions for a tinder box?

|Cross-Posted at Safety Neal's Fireside Chat|

Disaster Response and National Security, two interrelated concepts

Ran across this over at DefenseTech's blog.

After the September 11th attacks, the Department of Homeland Security was put together with two major goals in mind: deter further terrorist strikes, and respond to disasters, both natural and man-made -- since the evacuation plans, medical responses, and the like are largely the same in either case.

Four years and countless billions of dollars later, we've seen a clumsy, ten-thumbed response from DHS [to Hurricane Katrina]. Ships and troops were delayed for days before they were ordered to the disaster zone. Tens of thousands were left stranded, without food or water or medical care, while relief agencies were turned away.

All this, after a disaster everyone knew was coming. Now, imagine what would have happened after a surprise attack. Al Qaeda operatives have to be wondering the same thing. It's as if we've hung a giant "kick me" sign around the nation's neck.|Why Katrina Matters - DefenseTech|

Well said. I'd call this author a safety-hawk. This may overlap with being a greenhawk, someone interested in energy security and national security.

Mitzi Wertheim, a consultant to the DoD’s Office of Force Transformation [helped lead the greenhawk effort]. Dan Nolan, a retired Army colonel in charge of energy projects for the Rapid Equipping Force, crunched numbers to show that, since the transport of fuel to forward bases had become the soft target favored by insurgents, energy-inefficiency was costing the Army lives. Since then, the Army has begun to deploy tents made of solar-capturing materials to supply the energy needs of the bases. And also fuel-cell-powered vehicles that take advantage of the same innovations in batteries that have made laptops so small.
|The "Greenhawk" Moment - Standpoint|

Emergency First Aid: Flail Chest

My brother suffered a flail chest from a motorcycle accident a couple of years ago. The description and treatment are:

Conflagration

conflagration, originally uploaded by Farl.

Table Top Disaster Training

Today I did a table top training with Ramsey County CERT. We were tasked with keeping the perimeter on a multiple dwelling arson. (Note to self: never say anything to reporters, especially not words like arson.)

The scenario was that we were activated 12 hours into the fire in order to relieve the strain on law enforcement from the long fire and investigation. We had 21 volunteers to work with and several maps of the affected area.

My group worked together well. We sat around the maps and talked through what we would do. Ramsey county has lots of parks, so parks are good places to stage volunteers.

We initially blockaded the street and then set up an HQ at the south blockade. We never thought to ask if we could use someone's garage for the duration of the disaster, but that was a great suggestion we received later.

From the HQ we'd coordinate with fire and police as well as the VOAD's. A VOAD is a volunteer organization active in disasters such as the Red Cross/Red Crescent, Salvation Army, pet rescue societies, Doctors without Borders, et cetera. All VOADs are NGOs, of course.

My group thought to stop traffic (in a small perimeter), but we didn't consider trying to hold a large perimeter by re-routing buses, highways, contacting the railroad to hold trains, or evacuating nearby schools and churches.

We divided our small perimeter into two sectors (hot and cold) and planned to keep a tight perimeter around the hot area. We thought the cold area would eventually be opened to people living in the area whose homes weren't affected, but we still wanted to keep them out of the hot sector (which would contain the crime scene).

One thing to always be on the lookout for at a fire is how to keep crowds of gawkers away from the scene and be on your guard for foolish behavior from firebugs.

After dark falls, the best way to keep a perimeter is with dogs. Nobody (and I do mean nobody) wants to mess with a police dog. Some people will take advantage of a tragedy to loot and you want to avoid that, but disaster scenes are inherently dangerous and especially so in the dark. Flashlights don't last very long when you're going all night.

Cross country skiing for winter search and rescue

I took up cross country skiing this winter. The woods are beautiful in Minnesota.

Classic cross country skiing is a great workout for the whole body, is low impact and a great way to get around in the snow. A good way to stay in shape throughout the year for an emergency situation.

I think it would be useful for winter search and rescue, although the skis would degrade and lose some functionality if they were used on ungroomed trails, especially on broken ground and going over sticks and rocks.

Wildfire Today

I like the pyromaniac running Wildfire Today.