Arvada Auto X instructor, Scott Johnson-Meyers challenges firefighters with this “Final Destination” type scenario where a driver has been impaled through the shoulder and skewered to their seat at Arvada Auto X 2023 featuring Next Level Extrication and DeWalt Amkus Extrication Tools.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:

So obviously this guy’s having a bad day. He has a pole through him. So this is obviously not a very, common scenario, but it’s more of a how can we handle this kind of problem if we come across it? So super rare, but what kind of tools do we have to mitigate this kind of issue? Patient is gonna be unconscious, but the vitals are stable.

So end goal is to get him out of the car in a stable state.

Before we cut it, we gotta make sure that our paramedic is ready. So we don’t want this pipe to move or spin or heat up or do anything. The main idea of this is he’s super stable. Now. He can become unstable with a little bit of movement, so we don’t want anything to impinge.

He will fit if we cut the seat and just drag him out. But if this is a car or something like that, I would want everything just outta the way so we could really focus on this.

And as far as cutting the pole, when you’re gonna cut it, you just wanna make sure it’s not gonna heat up on your patients. So you can put a hand on it, you can cool it down.

We have water, we have rags, we have all this kinda stuff.

We can use the circular saw or the sawzall if that’s all you have. You just have to try to compensate for the vibration if it’s gonna be the circular saw. We didn’t necessarily need to cut the roof on this, I think for, it being a very kinda technical interior part of the extrication. It just creates space and get everything outta the way.

Cause a mess up here is what’s gonna kill your patient if you have the time to work, to get stuff away from it. You don’t. Up and on the head there. And if you get to the entire seat, it’s more difficult to transport cause its more things, but it’s actually better for your patient it’s containing them like kinda like a KED, and every single car is different now too.

We talked about newer cars they’re, there’s a lot more stuff in your seats. There’s a lot more wires running from both. So we had a little bit of problem with, uh, like having to need some snips just for a little bit of fabric. So you may need to cut some fabric. There may be wires in there for the heated backrests that massage you and do all that fancy stuff.

But if you can get to the bolts, just zipping ’em off with the tool that they actually use to put ’em in, it’s probably not very invasive and probably not very rocky for your patient. It does seem that most of the cars that we do this on, this back one, if there’s a center console, is almost impossible to get to.

Just something to think about if we have to remove a seat. Cause we don’t do this very often. We don’t really ever have a reason to. But in the small case that we do, just options, can we take it out the way they put it in? No. Can we cut the rails to take the whole seat together? Yes. No, we can’t cut the seat back.

Do we have to dissect the back of the seat? If you recline it off and that pole’s through it, if you don’t dissect a giant hole around it, it’s gonna pull on that pole. But if you basically hollow out the entire seat, maybe you can just recline it off. So this seat didn’t have any metal inside of it, just had a bunch of fabric.

But there are some that have giant metal plates. If you look at the Tesla, something actually punctures all the way through that you’re not gonna be able to cut through that metal to create a bigger hole. There’s no right or wrong way. Every single car is different.