Cutting a Car Apart

The fun continues: last night, we cut two cars apart.

One thing that often happens in vehicle accidents is that stuff gets bent around in ways that make it hard or impossible to get victims out. Even in relatively simple accidents, doors can get bent and jammed, making them barriers to getting to patients.

But we have Tools (tm)!

One is a surprisingly simple little gizmo that looks like a Bic pen. When you press it against the corner of a window, a spring loads, then releases, striking the window hard enough to shatter it. This works on all car windows except the windshield, which is apparently more resistant to that type of thing.

For windshields, then, we have a saw with a pointed end that, when swung, makes nice little holes in windshields. The saw then cuts through the glass, and does so much more easily than, say, a handsaw cuts through wood. (We also played with taking out a windshield with an axe, but you tend to not do that with a patient sitting in the front seat.)

Then there are spreaders. These are tools with arms that come to a point, that when inserted into a door opening, can bend a car door in half, or can be reversed to grab and bend the edge of a door. We also used it over the top of the door's sill to pop the door edge out to make more room for inserting them.

And cutters. Big hook-shaped scissors that can cut through a door post in a few seconds. And rams, that when positioned properly on both sides of the car, can roll back the dashboard like tinfoil.

All of these tools are powered by a hydraulic power plant (think: portable electric generator, only with fluid tubes coming off, instead of wires), making these tools fairly portable around an accident scene (i.e. not limited to being connected to rescue apparatus). And the tools themselves are fairly hefty, maybe 20-30lbs each for the smaller ones, and 50lbs or more (requiring two people) for the larger ones.

For the most part, while the class was good fun, it was mostly an awareness-level class; we'll be taking a VRT (vehicle rescue technician) class at some point in the future, to get better at it all. Still, to remove the windows, doors, roof and dash of two cars in fairly short order was pretty impressive stuff.