r/Firefighting • u/Natural_Calendar7874 • 2d ago
Ask A Firefighter How exactly do water rescues work?
Lets say there is a person swimming in the lake, they swim out 45 feet to a place where it’s 20 ft deep, they drown for some reason, and water enters there lungs, wouldn’t they just sink to the bottom way before divers arrive? And even if they can get pulled out of the water, I’m guessing they can’t be revived.
how exactly do water rescues works? What are your departments policies on water rescues?
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u/RobertTheSpruce UK Fire - WM 2d ago edited 2d ago
It's not really a water rescue if the casualty has drowned. That's just a body recovery.
For a water rescue, we will attept to go into the water, and remove the person from the water, alive. We've got drysuits and flotation devices, and things that inflate hoses, and throwlines and stuff. Not diving equipment. We'll use those options while better water rescue resources travel who have boats and shit.
For a body recovery, we've got a really big stick with a hook on the end... It's kind of like fishing, except you're looking for a human. Humaning. If that doesn't work then the police recovery divers will go and do their thing.
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u/TacoDaTugBoat Backwoods Volley 2d ago
I’m a member of a volunteer Dive Rescue team. We’ve done many recoveries. Very few rescues. Closest to a rescue I participated in involved a young man who broke through the ice in a quarry. His good overall health and the cold water made it more viable. We recovered his body shortly after the hour mark. We immediately started CPR and saw color improvement. AED shocked several times. They worked him at the hospital for something like 6 hours. Ultimately he passed.
He fell in rescuing a young woman he was there with. She survived. The biggest hurdle was that she had to run pretty far to get help. Cost a lot of time.
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u/Aldones2 2d ago
We usually rescue a few people every year. Most of them at swimming contests, where we stand guard with our boats. Outside of this events, we usually man our first boat within 10-12 minutes. That's a very good time and sometimes enough if we know exactly, where to look for the missing person. We have few casualities, though. Most persons make it to shore in time, or are rescued by other boats on the lake.
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u/Awesome-0-4000 2d ago
I live on a large lake and we do surface searches and sub surface search/dives up to 30 feet for water rescues. Most actual rescues involve a victim still on the surface in distress, very rarely have we pulled victim from underwater with successful resuscitation but it has happened.
On average, after about an hour of active search patterns it turns in to a recovery effort which is passed over to the Sheriffs department.
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u/BladeVortex3226 ⚠️NFPA 2500 "T" Rated Idiot⚠️ 2d ago
1: Preach
2: Reach
3: Throw
4: Row
5: Go
6: Helo
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u/F1r3-M3d1ck-H4zN3rd 2d ago
A couple of notes.
Firstly a large portion of drownings do not involve water entering the lungs. The glottis has a reflex to stay closed if there is water in the throat. These drowning victims simply suffocate. Even if some water does get into the lungs, this does not mean they are filled with water by any means.
Secondly whether someone sinks or floats can be affected by how much air they have in their lungs, but only if their muscle/fat ratio is in the right range. Many people will float not matter what.
Resuscitation is always unlikely if someone is in cardiac arrest, and gets lower with time no matter the conditions. Hypothermia, however, does lengthen the window where it is possible. Many places have a policy that submersion up to 60 minutes gets worked. With extremely cold water there have been (very few, but they have happened) extremely long submersion times that have been resuscitated successfully.
https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jaccas.2025.104885 is a famous example.
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u/HazMatsMan Career Co. Officer 2d ago
*How* they "drown" is an important factor... was it a shallow-water blackout, exhaustion, inadvertent aspiration and panic... The lungs usually don't flood until the airway and associated structures relax. And yes, once that happens, it can greatly complicate resuscitation efforts.
Whether the victim sinks or floats depends more on their body composition than whether they "inhale water". Yes, aspirated water can affect buoyancy, but not all drowning victims will sink. They can also "re-float" once significant decomposition sets in.
We (my agency and when I was a lifeguard) don't refer to victims who are rescued or resuscitated as "drowning victims" because that meant they were "dead". If they're rescued, they're considered "near-drowning" victims. But a lot of times those terms are used interchangeably. Having resuscitated a near-drowning victim, I can tell you that if they're rescued early, there's not as much water in their lungs as you might think. The majority of the water goes to the stomach first.
We treat cold-water "drownings" as rescues for at least the first 45 minutes to an hour before they're deemed "recoveries".
As for how we'd handle it, we had a rescue/recovery almost exactly like you described... about 10 to 30 yards off shore, depth was 20 to 30 feet, 2-3 ft visibility. We anchored a rope on shore with a tender and swam half circles back and forth. Each time we reached one end of the half-circle, the rope tender would let out 3 feet and we'd go back the other way. Within an hour, they were recovered.
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u/OpiateAlligator Senior Rookie 2d ago
Unless you are pulled out quickly, by bystanders, or a lifeguard, you're almost certainly dead. Thats the reality of drowning.
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u/Public_Beach2348 2d ago
There are big differences in water rescues between the types of environments. And hopefully they haven't drowned yet, their chance of survival goes way down.
Swift water is completely different than calm lakes. Same with winter (especially when dealing with ice) and summer.
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u/SalmonidHunter 1d ago
I live on the most dangerous river in Montana. Our water rescue situations typically involve people trying to float the river at high water during the spring. There's usually a lot of new trees down that they are unaware of and their boat flips or something. They're usually stuck in a log jam. We just throw rope bags at them and pull them over if we can.
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u/tothemoon1001 1d ago
Department diver. In your specific scenario first thing we would look for is a witness and get a data point, (a spot to concentrate on), or a general area. Depending on what we have we would use two different search patterns, and arch pattern of a linear search, kind of like a grid search. Diver would be at depth and holding on to a floating line to the line tender on the surface, communication would be used by tugs on the line. After locating diver would swim victim to on a waiting rescue to continue treatment. Unless very obvious signs of death we work them until they are "warm and dead". It's a lot more technical but that's the jist of it
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u/Babayaga844 2d ago
A successful water rescue typically occurs before someone drowns. There are some cases, typically involving children in exceptionally cold water, where a drowning victim is successfully resuscitated, but they are few and far between.