Firefighters Learning the Ropes

Below him, tourists sprawled beside the Holiday Inn pool enjoying the springtime sun as Point Mugu Firefighter Dale Althoff, 40, drifted slowly from the top of the Ventura hotel to the parking lot below--held aloft by a couple of ropes and a safety harness.

“I suppose if you’re a fireman you’d have to have a head for heights,” said Sylvia Gray, 70, watching from a deck chair as Althoff made his way to a ground crew waiting 320 feet down the promenade.

“I would volunteer for that, especially if they paid me,” said her husband, Jack, 72, enjoying a day poolside on holiday from their home in Cambridge, England.

As part of a “rigging for rescue” class sponsored by the Ventura County Fire Department, firefighters from Ventura, Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties were lowered--one by one--from the top of the 12-story structure.

The drill was intended to simulate what they would face if rescuing someone at the bottom of a gorge, or in some other spot that cannot be reached by foot patrol or helicopter, said California Department of Forestry Fire Capt. Tim Harness.

The technique allows ground crews to drop a rescuer into a tight spot where the victim is strapped into a harness, and then pull both to safety.

“If we didn’t have this class, we wouldn’t learn these techniques. You just can’t go out and pick up a bag of sand to practice this,” Harness said.

Mike Layhee, coordinator of the Los Angeles County Fire Department Urban Search and Rescue team, said the nine participants in Thursday’s class will go back to their agencies and share the techniques with colleagues.

Althoff, dangling above the pool, said he had been hoisted in such apparatus before. “But not this high.”

Passersby could not help but wonder if the crews on the ground felt scared for themselves or their colleagues in the air, but firefighters said the exercise was all part of the job.

“This is fun,” said Harness, taking up the slack in one of the ropes. “It’s like waiting for our turn on a ride.”

The scene reminded Jack Gray of a previous trip he and his wife had taken.

“When we were in Spain once years ago, a guy came down a rope on a motorcycle, would you believe?” he asked. “But I don’t think he was a fireman.”