In this vehicle extrication training, Arvada Auto X instructor, Brian Bird teaches firefighters how to properly and safely use Paratech Fire & Rescue Equipment struts and Hydra Fusions to lift a bus off a vehicle at the Arvada Auto X 2023 in Arvada CO.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:

 When we look at this bus, where are the hard parts on this bus? Where the rivots are, and where the black crash bars are right?. Great purchase point.

We’ll get our chasing struts on the outside. We’ll do our lift with the hydrofusion . We’re going to pressurize the struts so they chase the load, and all we have to do is spin the collars to capture our progress.

Whenever we’re doing our stabilization with struts, we never want anything touching the side of the strut, this is perfect. We just have the head or the base in contact with the load. And then we got a chain on here from, uh, we’re doubling down on that. The chasing of the struts is done automatically with what we call a VSK controller.

It’s coming off the bottle over there, right off the regulator. All these lines are pressurized at 25 psi when we turn it on and they’re just daisy chained together. So all the chasing struts are automatically going to be held at 25 psi. So when you move it up, it’s going to just lift the strut up, right?

If we don’t spin the collars down in time and the load settles on those struts, it will vent at 35 PSI. So it’s a set it and forget it device.

The last part of this, while we’re running these hydrofusion pumps, you get them back here where, where you can see each other, two people on the pump. And when you close this valve, just do it with one finger and just snug it. Because if we have to lower that and we’ve really clamped that valve down, we’ll get an uncontrolled drop on that strut.

So this just snug so I can, I can control it very easily. And when we do our pumps, we try to pump in unison. We’re gonna have markers on the tires. We put some 4×4’s so we can see if we need any lateral movement of this bus as we’re lifting.

And then, we’ll do five pumps. Pump, pump, pump, capture, capture, capture, capture. So we’re going to be spinning collars like crazy.

The best tool you can have is laying out there on the ground. It’s a Home Depot paint stick. And we just wrap Velcro on the, on the handle of it.

You can reach in, the velcro grabs your collars. So there’s collars, on the gold. You have collars on the hydrofusions. And there’s collars on the grays. So we, you know, we’ll have a couple of people on each side just chasing these as we’re going up. It’s capturing the progress.

When we see daylight, we stop. We pull that car out when get ready, just just slowly move that car back. When we do that, the tires are gonna be going deh, deh,deh, deh, right?

Because it’s in park and we have ratchet straps. We don’t need it out much.

Lower it.

So in this case, we just spin all the collars all the way up on all the struts. And then these guys on the valves of the hydrofusion pumps will control the lower.

That way, nobody’s in the collapse zone, and we’re just, we’re just letting these and you guys just have to… just nice and easy, just watch those slow, gradual decline on those.