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Dolan Dillon and Kevin Stokes spoke very calmly for men who were dangling 30 feet off the ground. 

“Clip in here,” Dillon said. “Nice! You got it.” 

The Humboldt Bay Fire Department staged a training exercise today on the Redwood Sky Walk in Sequoia Park Zoo. They simulated rescuing someone who was roped underneath one of the Sky Walk’s bridges and couldn’t get up (in a real-life scenario, most likely a maintenance worker working on one of the bridges). 

By Dezmond Remington.

Zoo director Jim Campbell-Spickler said the idea for the exercise came from the fire department. 

“The forest is dynamic,” Campbell-Spickler said. “If we had a situation where a tree fell and people were trapped, we’d want to know that we could save them.”

“A lot of people use [the Sky Walk],” Fire Chief Sean Robertson Tim Citro said. “We have to be prepared for it.” [Whoops! — Ed.]

Firefighter Dillon was the victim and Stokes the savior. The actual rescue only took a few minutes — Stokes rappelled down off of the bridge, attached Dillon to his harness, and other firefighters slowly lowered them to the ground — but the setup took about an hour. The firefighters took the time to figure out the best way to attach two people to the bridge safely without damaging any of the trees. They decided on clipping carabiners through eyes in the I-beam frame in the bridge, attaching ropes to those, and then wrapping the ropes over the railing on the other side. They used French Prusik knots on the steel cables holding the bridge up as a back-up.

By Andrew Goff.

Both Campbell-Spickler and the firefighters made it clear that in an emergency they would just wrap a rope around one of the redwoods, aesthetic qualities of the bark be damned. 

Eureka’s city manager Miles Slattery offered to be the victim again after being a drowning victim in a different Humboldt Bay Fire training department several weeks ago, but Robertson turned him down.

“We didn’t want to make it look like we were picking on him,” Robertson said. 

On a related note, while my colleague Andrew Goff and I were leaving the drill, we noticed the zoo’s resident crested screamers building a nest around a egg. Pleased at this beautiful symbol of nature’s continual renewal, we pointed it out to Campbell-Spickler, who immediately notified several different zoo employees. Maybe Eurekans will be blessed with a baby screamer in the coming weeks.