LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Here in Kentuckiana, some Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) officers are spending the day learning and practicing new life saving techniques when it comes to swift water rescues and flash flood emergencies.
And they're doing it in a place that might be familiar: Kentucky Kingdom!
The amusement park has partnered with LMPD to host this annual event on Sept. 14.
“An environment like this, you know, water is taking left turns and right turns - it's flowing very fast,” Capt. Michael Renn, with the Fern Creek Fire Department, said. “They've got pipes underneath that allow the water to create rapids in some areas on the river. We don't sometimes in real life, but in a training environment we get it.”
Whether they were diving, floating or climbing, crews completed day one of a 40-hour, multi-day training course, learning the ropes before they're called out for real water rescues.
“Training under these ideal conditions pays off in the long run when it's midnight on a 40 degree night and we have to go to work,” Major Philip Marchegion, with the Louisville Fire Department, said.
Participation comes from dozens of local police and fire agencies, as well as statewide and out-of-state agencies.
"We're very grateful from Kentucky Kingdom to give us this opportunity to use their facility. It's a tremendous facility, and a tremendous asset to have here in town," Crick said. "It gives us the opportunity to train up to 150 to 200 people over the next couple of days."
Throughout this training, local first responders practice real-life water rescue scenarios in the Blizzard River Ride. This gives officers the opportunity to train and practice in heavy current.
Drills teach responders skills like swimming aggressively through those currents, dodging objects like trees and large rocks in water and pulling someone to safety from shore.
"[It] teaches our guys how to handle that, where to move so that we don't drown them any further, how to protect the patient when they're in that kind of water and how are we going to extricate them out and get them to EMS or to their family," Renn said.
Chad Crick, with LMPD's dive team, is the training facilitator for the swift water training event.
"Kentucky's not no stranger to flooding," he said. "That's what we're doing today is making sure that everybody is ready to go in the event that we have an emergency."
With the many natural disasters taking place each year throughout the community, officials said training in Kentucky Kingdom’s Hurricane Bay provides first responders the ability to practice important safety protocols in order to deploy safe rescue missions in emergency situations.
This year, this event is taking on new significance after what the area has witnessed in eastern Kentucky.
"Obviously, you can see the recent event that we had over in Eastern Kentucky," Crick said. "We never know when that's going to happen. All we can do is plan for it."
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