So What Do We Know?

So What Do We Know?

Athletes know that a muscle group will lose strength and atrophy if not stretched and exercised regularly. Pilots know that their skills will deteriorate over time if not practiced.

The same principal applies to our emergency management and coping skills. It’s about dealing with stressful situations each day and flexing and developing these skills.

How do you react in a true emergency? Do you panic and wait/hope for help? Do you remain calm, look at all the facets of the problem individually and act on experience or logical assessments? Chances are that you are somewhere in-between. But you didn’t just wake up that way one morning. You have developed your emergency management skills over your lifetime, influenced by good and bad examples provided by family members, people you looked up to, teachers, etc. And these skills are refined as we deal with each day, each event, and each stressor.

In this next section from the next article describing the Seven Steps to Survival, I’ll look at the beginning of the first step. It’s recognized by different authors by different names, but it boils down to being able to recognize when you’re in danger.

Stay tuned..

Survival is not a 12 step program, or is it?

Rick McElrath

When I first became involved in outdoor safety and survival education with AMSEA (Alaska Marine Safety Education Association) in 1993, I believed that survival was what we did when the boat sank, or we became misplaced in the woods, or up a mountain or out in the desert. I believed that what I needed was the right equipment, and good judgment.

But after studying many different survival stories, participating in some survivor interviews, and living through some of my own experiences, I have begun to understand that we use survival skills in our everyday life, as we explored in my last article.

Yes, equipment is important, and it needs to be of good quality and more importantly you need to know how it works, understand its strengths and weaknesses. And good judgment helps us avoid unnecessary difficulties on a daily basis, and it has saved many lives.

But what do we do when our judgment fails? When the equipment fails? What is there to fall back on?

Well, a plan is good. Checklists are great. But it would be difficult to keep all the checklists for all the emergencies that we have the potential to fall into, rolled up neatly in a binder in our hip pocket. Oh, I guess you can store scores of checklists in your smartphone, and it would be useful right up to the point where the battery dies, or you drop it in the water.

What if I told you there’s a checklist that you can keep in your head that applies to just about all forms of trouble you can find yourself in? And what if I told you that you can memorize this checklist in about 15 minutes? Wait, there’s more..

During my first marine safety and survival class in Sitka, Alaska, the first order of business was to learn the ‘7 Steps of Survival’. These dynamic steps could be applied to any survival scenario or situation you found yourself in. And if Providence was in your favor, using these steps may likely extend your survival time on land or sea. But checklists like this are not new. I can think of two besides the 7 Steps to Survival, and both are effective in dealing with emergencies or survival situations.

Laurence Gonzales, author of ‘Deep Survival’ lists 12 rules of survival. The U.S. Army survival manual, FM 3-05.70 lists 8 survival ‘actions’ based on the letters in the word ‘survival’, and suggests that using these steps will help you develop a survival pattern.

So let’s look at the contents of some of these checklists, and see how, with appropriate training, we can apply them in emergencies or survival scenarios and hopefully, stay alive to tell the good story.

First, the 7 Steps to Survival. And remember, as I said before, these steps are dynamic. These steps are applied anytime during the emergency and re-applied as the situation changes.

First Things First

The first step is ‘Recognition’. When teaching these steps, I ask participants what they believe the meaning of recognition is, as a survival step. Sometimes they want to find a ‘deeper’ meaning, something more complicated. But this step isn’t cryptic, or bogged down in any ethereal dogma.

Recognition is simply the act of recognizing if what is happening is an emergency and demands immediate attention and decisive action. Acknowledging the emergency for what it is helps to sidestep the potentially deadly state of denial that can come after the initial confusion. Confusion is normal at first, while you parse out the details, but confusion can develop into denial if we fail to acknowledge and accept our situation. Taking positive action based on training and experience is the best first step to stave off denial in yourself and hopefully your teammates.

The Army manual has a similar step, a phrase starting with the first letter of the word survival. ‘Size up the Situation’. It describes the need to find a place of security, determine if the enemy is attacking (remember, Army manual), determine what is happening in the battle-space before developing a plan. So this is very much like the step, ‘Recognition’ from the 7 Steps. It goes on to break that first step down in to three areas to focus on; Surroundings, Physical Condition, and Equipment. They are so practical, the U.S. Army; but also very effective. What’s going on around me, what’s going on with me, and what tools do I have to work with.

In his ’12 Rules of Survival’, Laurence Gonzales starts with ‘Perceive and Believe’. It deals with avoiding immobilization by fear and denial. In the step of recognition, you look ‘with eyes open wide’ at what is happening and admit to yourself that, “no Dorothy, we are not in Kansas anymore”, and take appropriate action. Mr. Gonzales goes on in his steps to list ‘Stay Calm, Use Your Anger’ as the second step, and ‘Think, Analyze, Plan’ as the third. Both of these steps are critical to developing a realistic assessment of what is happening and what your immediate actions need to be, based on your experience and training. This, essentially, is “Recognition”.