On Oct. 23, recruits from the Astoria Fire Department got to work pulling apart a battered police vehicle that had been donated for training purposes.

Though firefighters go through extrication training six or seven times a year, this was their first time working with a police vehicle. In a split-second, life-or-death situation, the specialized training can make all the difference.

Fire Chief Dan Crutchfield said that because sheriff’s deputies, state troopers and police officers are constantly on the road, they’re just as likely to be involved in a crash as any other driver.

“It could be anything,” he said. “As simple as they’re just driving through town and somebody runs a red light and T-bones them or something, right?”

Police vehicles differ from civilian vehicles in several ways that are crucial for emergency responders to understand and be able to work around.

“There’s a cage in the back, and that’s not something you would find in a normal car, so they spent some time to remove that,” Crutchfield said. “That could be a challenge depending on if that’s needed or not needed.

“The other thing is that police officers have a lot of electronic devices. So there’s going to be light bars, there’s extra batteries, there’s extra wiring. They have computers up front … We know that there will be weapons, so that’s something that we want to either secure or utilize our law enforcement partners to help secure.”

An extrication after a crash requires a systematic approach. Whoever arrives on the scene first reports to dispatch that they’ve arrived and describes the scene in a few words before taking command until a chief officer arrives.

As an emergency responder determines the number of patients involved and the extent of their injuries, a hose line is deployed in case something catches fire in or around the car. If the crash is out on U.S. Highway 30 or U.S. Highway 26, Life Flight Network can be called to take patients to a hospital.

In the front seat of the vehicle during training, a mannequin represented an unconscious police officer, while firefighting intern Kiara Breckenridge sat in the back as an injured suspect and Lt. Tom Jaworski surveyed the scene and began commands.

“In this case, the suspect that was in the back of the car was not very badly injured, whereas the officer in our scenario was more significantly injured,” Crutchfield said. “And it may be best for the patient just to fly them straight from the scene to Portland. So those are all decisions that that officer and our incident commanders are going to be making.”

The extrication itself often begins with removing the car doors using a cutter and a spreader. The tools are battery operated and brand new, given to the department through a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant a year ago.

“The older tools, you had to have a motor or pump that you’d start, and then it would pump hydraulic fluid, and then you had to have a cable connected to the motor and to these tools,” Crutchfield said. “So we were kind of limited, like if a car was way over in an embankment, you’d have to take all your equipment to them. This is a lot better, and they’re more powerful.”

If needed, emergency responders pry the roof off the car and push the dashboard back with a ram. Once they’re able to get inside, the patients are carefully loaded onto backboards and brought away from the car for evaluation before being loaded into an ambulance or helicopter.

“There’s a lot of things we can do, but it’s really about what is the fastest, safest way to get patients out of the car,” Crutchfield said.

The car was donated by the Oregon State Police. Crutchfield said the state was considering donating more police vehicles to the Department of Public Safety Standards and Training in order to create a standard training program.

“And then a fire department could request the training, and they would bring a car out and send a trainer to teach people how to do this,” he said. “So that’s something that could be coming in the future.

“Training is important. We like to expose them to a lot of different things, because we’d rather find out we need a different piece of equipment or a different way of doing something in this environment, versus when there’s someone dying and we need to save them.”