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This thing is horrible.

Last night’s SES training was a little different for me. Instead of studying theory in the unit offices I got to go out on the road and do some serious damage to a couple of car wrecks that we had for training. The unit just took delivery of a “heavy rescue” hydraulic kit, which consists of a set of cutters, a set of spreaders, two hydraulic rams and a hydraulic pump that’s capable of running three things at once.

The spreaders were fairly heavy (25kg) but they’re extremely powerful. The tip is about 10mm across when they’re fully closed, but they open up to 830mm, so they’ll easily fit into the gap between a couple of bent panels and allow you to open up a door. They open and close with 25 tons of force, so a mere car lock is nothing for them. They’ll close with the same force too, so crushing a car’s roof pillar is trivial.

The cutters aren’t nearly as heavy (only about 15kg) but they’re pretty tough too. They’ll cut through metal like it isn’t there. We took the roof off two cars — first use the spreaders to crush a pillar so it’s thin and easy for the cutters to get a grip, then use the cutters to snip through the pillar like it isn’t there. We took the roof off an old Commodore and it was pretty easy. The Lancer coupe was a little tricker because it’s a two door hatchback (very wide rear pillars) but still no real trouble. With that car we cut the top and bottom of the A pillars off and took them away completely, then had two people with a crowbar at the rear of the roof while two people lifted the front of the roof and bent it over backwards.

We also tried out the new hydraulic rams we got. We used them to push the dashboard and firewall off the front of the Commodore: cut the windscreen across the bottom, cut the buttom of the A pillars off, then use the rams to push from the bottom of the B pillars to the top of the front door frames. The dashboard and firewall move forward without any trouble at all.

We got the new heavy rescue kit (like about 50 other units) because of the increasing number of heavy vehicle accidents: trucks, buses and trains. I’ve talked to a few people in our unit and car accidents are way down on what they used to be, primarily because cars these days are safer than ever. People who were in the unit 20 or 30 years ago had to deal with a lot more carnage than we do these days. If you do have to deal with an accident today it’s more likely to involve heavier vehicles and cars with higher strength doors, side impact structures, etc, hence the heavy rescue kit.

And then there were five. We’ve since lost one more, so we’re down to four.

Here’s what happened 12 months back.

You can now post video to flickr as well as photos. Not sure I like this; the flickr community is all about photography. Take your videos to youtube, please. Leave us alone.

One nice thing that has come along with video is a bump in the size of photos you can upload. It’s now 10MB per image for free accounts and 20MB per image for pro accounts. Sweet.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything on the blog. I’ve been very busy with work, Lisa has been very busy (as usual) trying to keep two kids in check, and for the last week we’ve been lazing on the beach at Surfer’s Paradise. There’s some photos up on SmugMug (check your URL) and I’ll be putting some up on flickr over the next 24 hours as well.

We had a great time while we were away. We did the usual tourist thing with the theme parks (Movie World and Seaworld) but we also got to spend an evening with Uncle Bill and Aunt Cora and Bill’s daughters. Melissa cooked a wonderful dinner for us on the last night we were there.

Surfer’s Paradise was as expected: highly commercial and full of skanks and posers, but the beaches are good, the night market was good, accomodation is reasonably well priced and the climate is brilliant.