Basic Emergency Rescue Technician: The Indianapolis Rescue Training Curriculum From 1990's

by Robert Zickler, Janet Daskalos (Editor), Mitch Davis

The Indianapolis Fire Department in the late 1980’s had put special rescue response teams in place related to collapsed buildings, trench, vehicle extrication (including semi-trucks, passenger buses and passenger trains), but the department had not yet developed an adequate program for initial training nor continuing education. The Federal Department of Transportation had provided a usable model in their approach to emergency response to injuries on highways and roads by establishing a curriculum referred to as the Basic Emergency Medical Technician. The DOT EMT program model provided a framework for rescue response training that the Indianapolis Fire Department adopted. The Indianapolis Fire Department began the development of the Basic Emergency Rescue Technician (B.E.R.T.) in 1987. The DOT emergency medical technician curriculum set out minimum essential competencies for people/equipment staffing an ambulance and so to the Basic Emergency rescue curriculum was developed to establish minimum essential competencies for responders assigned to rescue events. The Basic Emergency Rescue Technician curriculum evolved over a ten-year period with the completion of the course material (except water rescue) and was presented to students in eight modules over four-to-six-month period. This rescue curriculum was used extensively in central Indiana and parts of Ohio. Sections of the introductory B.E.R.T module were copied and used directly in the Lifting and Rigging module of the FEMA national urban search and rescue training program.
Each of the eight B.E.R.T. modules were based on a set of basic tasks that were applicable to all rescue environments. These tasks included incident management, team management (division of labor tailored for each rescue environment), basic rigging/principles of mechanics, equipment selection, placement and management, incident documentation, debriefing, effective use of quality assurance processes and attention to scene safety practices. The time split guideline for each module was 40% didactic and 60% practicum.
The material is left intact with no redactions to provide the reader with as much insight as possible to the original version. This means that both the instructor manual and the student manual are included. The instructor and student manuals cover the same material, but the student manual has open spaces for taking notes. These formatting decisions created large files but did prove valuable to teaching and learning processes. Moving this material from1997 WinWord DOC Format has proved to harder than one would expect. Therefore, not all illustrations and formatting will be accessible or intact.
Original files in the 1997-word version can be made available to researchers interested in exploring the Basic Emergency Rescue Technician Curriculum.

8808 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 2, 2025