Firefighter Carries and Drags – Part 2 The Hasty Chest

The second firefighter drag and probably the most popular is the hasty chest.  This drag is completed by simply wrapping a girth hitch across the firefighter’s chest and under his arms with your webbing, then wrapping the extra webbing a couple of times around your gloved hand to allow for a good strong hold on the drag.

girth hitch under the arms

Rodeo wrap around hand to secure position

The next tool that uses the same method, but is commercially made, the ‘Sav-a-Jake.’  It consists of two pieces.  First a piece of webbing with two biners on it and a ‘y’ piece of webbing with two pull handles and a connection pointon the other end.  It can be integrated into the DRD or locked under the armpits and then snapped on to the pull handles.  It can even be run through the shoulder straps as shown on their website.

If you’re interested in sav-a-jake, you can click here to find out more about their product with additional uses for this simple but effective tool.

Firefighter Carries and Drags – Part 1 The ‘L’ Carry

The next few posts will be devoted to showing and listing different carries and drags of firefighters and victims.  The first is the ‘L’  carry or drag and all you need is your webbing.  15′ of webbing may work, but we’ve found that 20′ is the optimal length and will guarantee that you’ll be able to perform the wrap on the largest firefighter.  As you approach your victim and you find the legs, take one leg and wrap a girth hitch (also known as a larks foot or cow hitch) around either one of the thighs.

single girth hitch around one thigh

After you’ve girthed the thigh, you should move to the back of the firefighter and take one part of the loop under each of the victims armpits creating two pull loops.

Completed 'L' carry with two pull loops

The completed harness leaves two pull loops for either one or two firefighters to use to pull the victim.  Additionally, you can girth the two pull loops to make one pull handle creating two constricting points on your victim.  This would be called an ‘L’ carry with a girth or larks foot.

The benefits of this harness is that it is easy to complete blacked out and with gloves on and it doesn’t constrict the chest like a hasty chest harness does.   I will cover the hasty chest in a later post.  The only potential negative that I can think of with this harness is that if you let go of your pull handles, or slip and fall it might take a moment or two to reset the harness before you resume your drag again.

Additionally, we thought that if you girthed  both legs at the knee and completed the rest of the harness in the same way that you might have a great handle for a second firefighter to grab if you were removing the victim up a set of stairs.  We haven’t drilled the idea yet so I’ll let you guys know what the outcome is when we figure it out.