PORTSMOUTH, Ohio — Eighteen officers and firefighters with the Portsmouth Fire Department have completed a weeklong Trench Rescue Technician course, adding a specialized underground-rescue skill to a department that already answers some of Scioto County’s most technical emergency calls. The Portsmouth Fire Department announced the completion in a Facebook post reported by the Scioto Valley Guardian.
The training covered the shoring and shielding methods crews use to stabilize a collapsed or unstable trench before anyone enters it, along with victim rescue techniques and critical-thinking scenarios designed to prepare firefighters to work quickly and efficiently if the skills are ever needed on a real call, according to the department’s post. Instructors from Crash Course, a technical rescue training provider, led the course.
Trench collapses rank among the most dangerous hazards in emergency response and construction. A single cubic yard of soil can weigh more than a ton and can bury a worker in seconds, which is why federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards generally require trenches deeper than 5 feet to be shored or otherwise protected. Deeper excavations, and trenches that intersect other excavations, call for the added expertise of trained technicians, and excavations deeper than 20 feet require a shoring system calculated by a registered professional engineer.
The course followed National Fire Protection Association technical rescue standards, according to the Scioto Valley Guardian’s reporting on the department’s announcement. Crews who completed it can now respond to utility, construction and roadway excavation accidents that demand specialized rigging, shoring and extrication equipment beyond the tools used on conventional fire and rescue calls.
The new certification extends a technical-rescue roster the Portsmouth department has built over time. According to the city, the department operates three stations and employs 38 sworn officers protecting Portsmouth and Sciotoville. Alongside structure fire and medical response, it already fields an Urban Search and Rescue Unit and a Water Response and Dive Team serving a community that sits along the Ohio River.
For residents and for the utility and construction crews who dig across Scioto County, the training means a trench emergency in Portsmouth no longer has to wait on outside specialists to begin a safe rescue. Stabilizing a trench is slow, deliberate work by design, and having 18 locally based technicians trained to do it shortens the distance between a collapse and a properly shored, survivable rescue scene.
The department thanked the Crash Course instructor crew for leading the training in its post, the Scioto Valley Guardian reported. The newly trained technicians now return to regular shifts across the department’s three stations, where their trench rescue skills will be available on calls throughout Portsmouth and Sciotoville and, when neighboring communities need them, across the wider Scioto County area.