Firefighters Train For Ice Rescues

Firefighters took to a local lake to train for ice rescues.

Bristol Township Fire Rescue, which is the municipality’s paid daytime response crew, braved a temperature of 10 degrees Thursday morning to prepare.

Firefighters Brian Gerhard, Alex DelVecchio, TJ Stressman, Andrew Boyle, Todd Dipopolo, Dan Matthews, and Mike McKenney trained on Magnolia Lake off Lakeland Avenue.

Fire Marshal Kevin Dippolito, who leads the fire department, said the training was to “hone our ice rescue skills under realistic and sub-freezing conditions.”

Wearing special gear, firefighters went into the water one-by-one to pull a mock victim, who was really one of their peers, from the ice-covered lake.

“We practice various water rescue operations several times throughout the year,” the fire marshal said.

Dippolito said the crews made a hole in the ice in preparation for the training.

An advantage of training in the bitter cold was that crews were preparing for real-world complications, like equipment and tools freezing.

“Our equipment freezes and we have to overcome that,” Dippolito said. “Our gloves, our carabiners – all that stuff gets wet and freezes quickly. When we practice in temperatures like this, it allows us to develop techniques to overcome these issues.”

The training was planned before news of the icy rescue in Yardley Borough by a Levittown teenager and his friend became public, but the story put an additional focus on the nesseary training for the firefighters.

Dippolito thanked the Bucks County Parks and Recreation Department for allowing crews to train on the county-owned lake.

Magnolia Lake was a gravel pit for the Pennsylvania Turnpike construction project in the early 1950s before it filled with water during storms.

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