“Survival is not all physical,” says John McMillan, who conducts his U.S. Coast Guard-approved one-day survival-training course all over America’s coasts and waterways. In fact, physical strength has less to do with survival than knowing what to do and how to do it.
In other words, like the old joke, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”, how you get out of a car, boat or aircraft underwater is with practice. And that important element is the secret to McMillan’s Offshore Survival Training course.
The Coast Guard has tried again and again to make commercial fishermen aware of the few minutes they have to don their survival suit, make a distress call, light a flare, grab an EPIRB (electronic locator), and launch a life raft before their boat goes under. It’s less than five minutes.
The sinking of fishing vessels with all hands lost, as McMillan wrote in a piece for the Maine Lobsterman’s Association newsletter, “Has drawn strong attention to the fact that fishermen need something more than common sense, physical strength and years of experience.” He wrote that he’d never met a fisherman who said he or she was not physically capable of surviving an accident at sea. But he thinks training for survival should also focus on the mental aspect: “how a person is trained is how he or she will react in the face of danger,” he states.
McMillan, 50, a Louisiana native, moved to Belfast in 1980 after taking a house-building course at the Shelter Institute in Bath. He has taught his Offshore Survival Training courses since 1977 and has trained over 85,000 people, charging $150 for the day-long course. He said, “We’ve had about 44 come back and say that they needed the training because of helicopter accidents, man overboards, and vehicular entrapments.”
“We had a guy who was recreationally fishing,” he said. “His boat capsized, and he was caught under the hull. We had another gentleman fall asleep at the wheel of his pickup truck. The road was under construction, and he went into a ditch. He had to open up the sliding glass back window to get out. The door was jammed on the bottom. When he got out, he was underneath the truck bed. He’d trapped some air, but it was still dark. What we teach them is, you go hand over hand till you find an opening. That’s basically what he did.”
Not content with that story, McMillan tells yet another: “We had a group on Halloween Day, Oct. 31, back in about 1992. They went through the course, and five days later four of them were in a helicopter that went down right on take-off from an offshore rig. All four of the people got out. One lady was hospitalized. The pilot got out, too. All survived.”
He taught his one-day survival course in Belfast on April 7 after teaching it in Louisiana and then on Cape Cod. A busy man, he’s either on the road or in a pool. He’s rarely home. In fact, at one point during the pool training at Belfast, a friend of his wandered in to ask a question and McMillan said, “I’m so busy, I see more of your son than I do my wife.”
His wife and partner will be the person at the other end of the line when you call to inquire about the business. On top of everything else, McMillan is active in his son’s Boy Scout troop. A friend’s son is the Scout leader.
That the busy McMillan would undertake the scout troop was believable after watching him teach four young men how to escape from a helicopter under water. The men, Mainers aged 21 to 36, needed the training because they work on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and get to and from the oil rig by helicopter. They know each other because they all work for the same company and they how to swim; that’s about it.
The men spent three hours in the morning learning survival planning and survival strategy techniques. He said, “We have something we call Human Factors, which affect your survival. We take a look at injury management, oil fire debris, hypothermia — everything from the time of day to the people you’re with: are they injured? Do they know how to swim? It’s taking a group of people and making them a team. We give them a little bit of leadership skills, breathing techniques, stress management. We familiarize them with the equipment, the U S. Coast Guard and Federal Aviation Administration equipment that’s going to be in their helicopter. We teach them underwater escape techniques, water survival skills, and self-confidence development.”
After lunch, he teaches them how to use life jackets, how to use and maintain an inflatable life raft, and how to help search and rescue teams find them. (The trick, he said is not to yell and wave, but to splash water with their hands or kick with their legs and feet. It’s much more visible.) The students also had to learn rescue procedures and how to transfer over water. The rest of the afternoon they spent in Belfast high school’s pool practicing what McMillan calls Underwater Egress Training. They didn’t have to practice getting into survival suits because they work in warm water. First, they practiced turning a life raft right side up and hoisting themselves into it. But they spent the most time on the most important part of the training: learning how to get out of a closed area underwater.
McMillan, a calm, easygoing man, teaches using encouragement and praise. He designed the simulator he uses as a teaching tool and had it made from aluminum pipe. It looks like an open rectangle with solid aluminum front and back seats, each equipped with a seat belt. The thought of having to escape from any enclosed space under water is just plain frightening, but instead of having to practice escaping from, say, a box with a seat, this bunch of pipes is about as threatening as a baby’s smile. One at a time, each student, wearing an uninflated inflatable vest, climbed into the simulator and strapped himself in. McMillan had him put his left hand in his lap and his right hand on the area where a window would be.
The problem of being underwater in the dark is that of disorientation: not knowing where you are, according to Matt Stupinski, 22, of Topsham. Seth Young, 21, of Bangor, agreed, but said, “The longer you’re under, you calm down.” That statement sounded backwards, but none of the students ever stayed under water long enough to run out of breath. Once a student–later two students at a time–had his seat belt on and was ready, he’d lean his head back and take a deep breath while McMillan tipped the simulator upside down. All that was visible from the surface was the bottom of the simulator, two feet, and McMillan, treading water right beside it for safety. He had the student move slowly and carefully. The left hand undid the seat belt, the right hand, placed on the simulated window area, “told” the student where to try to exit. Once free of the simulator, the student tried to swim two body lengths from the “wreckage.” They all swam in different directions due to the disorientation, but, surprisingly, all the students made it out in about 12 seconds.
After they realized they could escape, McMillan added a complication, whether it was “heavier seas” or having to open a “real” simulated window. Kai Christiansen, 36, of Naples, said, “Each time I’m a little more comfortable.” Ben McKenney, 27, of Casco, agreed. Then McMillan started them with their hands on their laps instead of on their reference points. Once he’d tipped the simulator over, they could grab the seat belt and window. The fourth time they practiced, he had them wait till the water filled the “cabin” before trying to escape. Adding new tasks one by one made it less intimidating. Doing the exercise in pairs also seemed to help. The students learned the dead man’s float, turning the head to the side to free the nose and mouth to catch a breath then exhaling under water because it’s the easiest way to conserve energy. A couple of the students were terrific at floating, the others weren’t quite as good, but they all stuck it out, expending as little energy as possible.
By the end of the session, it seemed clear that these four students, like the many others McMillan has trained, would know how to save their lives if their helicopter or car ended up in the water.
The numbers speak for themselves. Seven hours of Offshore Survival Training by an expert with 29 years of experience who has trained over 85,000. Like learning how to do CPR and the Heimlich maneuver, learning how to do underwater egress might come in handy some day.
For more information contact McMillan Offshore Survival Training at 207-338-1603 or go to www.mcmillanoffshore.com.