Scotia Cranes provided the Massachusetts Task Force- 1 (MATF-1), the New England Regional FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) task force, with three cranes for a specialized training session in Beverly, Mass.
The MATF-1 is almost completely composed of local firefighters who volunteer their time at the Beverly Facility in order to be ready for a disaster or other critical situation. The people who run the facility (the training team) are local firefighters who were involved in search and rescue operations at Ground Zero on 9/11 in New York City.
“It was very humbling to sit at lunch and dinner with these people and listen to their stories of chaos when they arrived on site the same day the towers were attacked. These men and women are the real deal, I would say comparable to the U.S. military as far as their will to intentionally put their lives on the line to save others in catastrophic situations. They also were deployed during Hurricane Katrina,” said President of Scotia Cranes, Mike Crowell.
Throughout the year at the Beverly MATF-1 Facility, the representatives and instructors run a series of training sessions for firefighters and qualified personnel to train for possible deployments. Each training session has a specific purpose. The most recent training session focused on training firefighters how to work with and around cranes for their heavy equipment and rigging specialist (HERS) training.
Scotia Cranes provided three cranes to work with the FEMA crew in Beverly, Mass.: one Grove GMK3055 60-ton all-terrain crane and two Grove RT770E 70-ton rough-terrain cranes, all bought or rented through Shawmut Equipment Company Inc.
The emergency workers used the cranes to rig all the rubble out of the way to uncover and recover people and victims during instruction by the Urban Search and Rescue Division (US&R). The class included 74 firefighters from various municipalities in New England. Scotia Cranes performed rigging and hand signal training, scale pans training, and personnel basket training.
Lift & Access is part of the Catalyst Communications Network publication family.
