Rescuers take on Busch Gardens ride to train for hurricanes

Tampa, Florida -- The rafts were missing from Busch Gardens' Congo River Rapids ride Thursday as 40 rescuers leapt into the rushing waters to practice pulling flood victims to safety.

The teams of firefighters that took to the water are special search and rescue squads, trained to rush to areas after disasters like hurricanes and hunt for survivors.

Building collapses and confined spaces are the specialties of the teams, which came from Tampa Bay and Central Florida; braving raging water added a new set of techniques to their resume of crucial lifesaving skills.

Before dawn, Busch Gardens workers fired up the waters on the Congo River Rapids ride. Normally, guests face each other in round, twelve-seat rafts and bound downstream.

But Thursday, in four particularly powerful stretches of the simulated river, instructors taught techniques to students as the trainees fought the current, grabbed rescue ropes, and fought off obstacles.

At one station, a fire hose strung across the river acted like a lasso to collect floating students and haul them ashore. Around the bend, a different group of firefighters flipped themselves over and heaved themselves under an obstacle that simulated a log lodged across the stream.

In one of the most challenging sections, a rescuer waded into the current and snatched a student "victim" as he or she floated by. The two would then be swept downstream together, but then reeled back to the river bank by a rope tied to the rescuer.

The partnership between the theme park and the state's Urban Search and Rescue Task Forces may be the only one like it in the country, instructor Jason Fair said.

In North Florida, lessons like this take place in open water as tides rush in and out. In South Florida, students faced the flood of water created by the output of a power plant's cooling system.

Busch Gardens' ride provides key improvements over those settings: more realism and more control. The whitewater that sends laughing guests home soaked is surprisingly similar to real rushing floodwaters, Fair said.

And no other training location can provide Congo River Rapids' margin of safety. In a real emergency, the entire ride can be drained of water in just three minutes, Fair said.

This same Tampa Bay rescue team has trained in other creative ways in the past. The squad's called Florida Task Force 3, and a few months ago they built a hurricane recovery camp to test out their gear. And two years ago, they practiced rescuing flood victims with boats by hanging out near a dam.

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