Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Members of the Meherrin Volunteer Fire and Rescue spent two days recently training in a labor-intensive class to better prepare them for water rescues.

Six fire department members completed swift water rescue training on Saturday, Aug. 8, and Sunday, Aug. 9, beginning in the Hampden-Sydney College pool and concluding on the Roanoke River in Weldon, North Carolina.

Chief Trey Pyle said the first day was spent learning swimming techniques, rescue swims and water entry techniques.

The second day of class was spent covering throw bag operations, water entry in moving water, swimming techniques in moving water and rescue procedures.

“As we have seen in the past years, our weather patterns are always changing,” Pyle said. “We felt like it was the right step to take to have a resource available for the area to assist when those adverse weather conditions happen.”

Rescue Extrication Delivery Specialists (REDS) Team taught the swift water rescue training.

REDS is a technical rescue operations team providing a wide variety of rescue response and training in areas such as missing persons search, swift water rescue, dive rescue and recovery, confined space rescue, trench and structure collapse rescue, high angle rescue, animal rescue and specialized extrication.