MASON CITY, IA---Every minute in America around 3 people are hurt in car crashes.
No matter where or when those wrecks happen, emergency workers are racing to meet or beat what they commonly refer to as the "golden hour."
It's the critical time between when an accident happens and when a patient begins receiving care from emergency room doctors.
These days there are more fire stations, faster trucks and helicopters to get people to hospitals.
Thanks to big advancements in safety, more people are surviving horrific crashes that might have killed them just a few years ago.
But there are also more hurdles to getting those patients to medical help in a timely fashion.
Rescue crews are increasingly facing high tech challenges as they arrive on crash scenes.
There are more airbags, there are hybrid cars and perhaps the biggest problem is ultra-high strength steel frames.
They can be difficult and in some cases nearly impossible to cut through.
"We're trying to get around those tougher metals is probably 90% of our problem," said Le Grand District Firefighter Tony Westendorf.
These days smart safety systems in vehicles can include more than a dozen air bags in newer vehicles and seatbelt pretensioners.
They are among several potential hazards as rescuers attempt to get crash victims out.
"I've got to peel and peek, I’ve to pull the upholstery away, pull the plastic out of the way, to make sure I’m not cutting through a cylinder," said De Witt Fire Chief and trainer Bob Sandry.
He also sells rescue and fire equipment and recently gave a seminar to firefighters in the Le Grand area that included the cutting up of 2 cars.
Sandry cautioned the assembled firefighters not just to rush in and start cutting because they might accidentally hit highly pressurized cylinders hidden in certain parts of the vehicle.
"If you cut through them you could kill your passenger or your people in the car or yourself," said Toledo Firefighter Loyce Staker.
Alternative fueled or hybrid vehicles are also a growing concern.
They could potentially takeoff on their own.
That is why Sandry recommends that rescuers use ignition key fobs to shut the vehicles off and then get them away, out of the range of the vehicle's receiver.
"All’s they got to do is the patient becomes conscious and the foot hits that accelerator and where's the car going," asked Sandry. "The cars going down the road, so we got to try to get in there and isolate the key fob or put the car in park, and hit the ignition button."
There are also high voltage wires in hybrid vehicles to worry about.
"If we have to cut through those power lines it could potentially kill us," said Westendorf.
All of this extra caution must be taken as precious seconds tick away.
"And sometimes seconds count, especially if we know the person is still a viable victim and we have to get them out and start CPR on them," said Westendorf.
"Is it a challenge with new cars? It sure is a challenge with new cars, but do i know how to go after it, it's the education part," said Sandry.
Sandry believes that firefighters using just about any vintage of cutting equipment can get good results, "and that's really where we come back to the training and what type of finesse and technique do my firefighters have."
He encourages firefighters to avoid tougher metals and find weaker areas of vehicles to cut through.
"It’s all that training thing and habit forming animals, we're in the habit of doing things in a series, we do that series of things, it'll get quicker for us, it'll get quicker, it'll get better, we'll get better," said Sandry.
Recently the Floyd Fire Department squared off against Floyd County Search and Rescue members in a friendly competition in Charles City.
Floyd County Search and Rescue has much more experienced people, but it has cutting equipment that dates back to the early 1970's.
Floyd Fire's equipment is brand new and its members have about a year's worth of experience.
Both teams performed three basic extrication maneuvers on the same model of car to make the competition as even as possible.
It took Floyd Fire's team nearly 11 minutes to cut a door off, create a 5th door (this means taking the front and rear door off of a 4 door car and removing the center post) and to lift up the car's dashboard.
It took Floyd County Search and Rescue about 2 more minutes to complete the very same job.
"It showed how well the new equipment works even if you have more experienced people, new tools really make the difference," said Floyd Fire Department Chief Ben Chatfield.
"So if you can get it done and instead of 10 minutes it takes you 7 or 8 minutes, you've gained 2 or 3 minutes that's a lot, that's a lot," said Calvin Schultz with Floyd County Search and Rescue.
"The bottom-line of the whole thing is to get the patients out, and get them to the hospital, that's the whole idea behind everything is save lives."
Currently Floyd County Search and Rescue is taking donations.
Their goal is to get enough money to upgrade their gear and get equipment like Floyd Fire purchased following a fundraising campaign last year.
Sandry said all the new technology is placing more emphasis on training.
He said that as of July 1st Iowa is mandating 24 hours of training for firefighters this year.
All this as departments deal with tighter budgets and greater demands on volunteers.
One of the casualties of the 2008 financial crisis was a national nonprofit agency called COMCARE Emergency Response Alliance.
The group that was putting together an online program to get schematics of vehicles into the hands of rescue squads.
The idea was to give crews on the scene, help in figuring out quickly, where to safely cut.
Support from the troubled auto industry faltered and the group folded.
But the makers of the "Jaws of Life" extrication tools are offering their own version of the software for a fee.
