Los Angeles City Fire Department Hazmat Response Team

Equipment and Manpower Staging Area

LAFD USAR Style Stokes Litter with Three-Wheels

The patients head is elevated (nice feature to protect the patients airway). Special care must be exercised to minimize the chance of tipping, specially when the patient is being loaded into the litter. 

Individual patients are first loaded (rolled) onto a plastic spine board. The patient is then lifted (onto the spine board) into the three-wheeled stokes litter. 

Note the two straps visible adjacent to the front wheel. These straps are used by two hazmat responders to 'pull' the patient through an elevated master stream appliance (large nozzle using a wide-patterned fog stream). Once the patient has been thoroughly grossly decontaminated, the patient is pulled toward definitive emergency medical care personnel.

Non-ambulatory patients can be transferred onto elevated ladders where runoff from the decontamination process is collected by decontamination tanks.

On the left side of the picture is a blow up shelter which is used to provide modest protection when decontaminating non-ambulatory patients. Note the metal 'ladder-like' unit that sits on top of saw horses. This unit has rollers that enable patients on backboards to be easily moved in a conveyor fashion through the decontamination / medical evaluation / definitive care process.

Ambulance gurney's can always be used to transport patients on the flat backboards. However, this presents a problem with both decontaminating the gurney and ensuring that the gurney has been completely decontaminated. Additionally, victims would never be carried by emergency responders in a real incident due to the potential for chemicals to be present on the exterior of the protective clothing making direct skin contact which could injure the patient.

Another method for transporting non-ambulatory patients at hazmat / NBC (Nuclear / Biological / Chemical) incidents is with the Raven Litter.

Here's a homemade design for transporting the Raven Litter.