Originally Posted By: Lono
This is NOT a criticism of the rescue or rescuers that took place, but I think its interesting the number of bystanders who essentially did nothing - there was even someone so detached from the burning car that they were able to film the entire incident. This matches with my experience at a couple fairly grisly accident scenes: they don't see a way in, they don't see all the victims, they don't see a way to help the victims they know of, they are afraid of moving a victim from a burning car. I'm not critical of the bystanders, I think they basically didn't have a starting point (training and experience) for dealing with this emergency. Some people had good instincts - they saw a victim that had to get out of the car pronto, and started bashing the windshield and trying to get it out of the way. But I don't have any experience in removing a windshield either, and apparently its hard. Lucky for the firefighters arriving on scene, they at least have experience and didn't hesitate to move more glass out of the way.

Its a good scenario to ask yourself though, knowing what you know, knowing what you have in your car, where would you be if it happened today - working on the windshield, wielding a fire extinguisher, or taking the time to film this, or running away because you're afraid the car is about to explode? (they don't, at least not like on TV).


Lono,

Your comments go for large portions of our population.

I once put out a car fire in the parking lot of my graduate school. A classmate came in, somewhat in a panic, used a phone to report the fire. I overheard her, walked toward the parking lot, knowing there was an extinguisher along the way, grabbed it, got to the car, put out the fire. It was really no big deal, except for the woman and her husband (also a classmate) because the fire destroyed the car.

A number of other classmates watched from the library windows and asked afterward how I knew what to do. Truthfully, I am still somewhat amazed that these intelligent people did not have an idea about what to do. The instructions for the use of an extinguisher are right there on the extinguisher. Everyone I have known has seen them time and time again, and I know of no one who has not read them once in a while. So it baffles me, why people would have no idea what to do. My thought is that they do but cannot reach that information in their brains when under pressure. Thaqt's what practice and training is all about.

And your suggestion as to asking yourself what you would do is right on. That's a pretty much practice I learned while in a maritime academy, always be asking yourself such questions. What would you do if _______ occurred? Keep switching a differnet thing going wrong into the blank. When something arises that has gone wrong, you might have already gone over the potential incident in your mind. But at any rate, you've trained yourself to think about incidents.

Sometimes you also need to train under pressure, so you can handle it too.

When you've trained the right way, the training takes over, your mind is prepared to handle the pressure, analyze what's happening, think about how to solve the problems, and take action.

For those who haven't ever done anything like this, they can freeze and not take any action.

And as far as the original title of this thread, YES, a thousand times YES, always carry a knife.