We also have a floor collapse simulator similar to this at our training centre. It has caused a number of injuries, dislocated elbows and shoulders, numerous sprains and a broken wrist.
The jury is out if it is a good training tool. The injury investigations don’t really show that it is a technique problem with using the simulator. There is just a reasonable chance of injury in a simulated collapse.
We have stopped using ours as the risk of injury was deemed too high for the potential training benefit.
Y’all we’re either falling way too far, not using proper technique in the first place, or didn’t have enough padding at the bottom. I’ve been through and helped instruct numerous academies where we use these with zero injuries
I don’t know what to tell you. Ours has about a 6 inch fall, it is not terribly different than this.
Maybe yours was safer somehow without seeing it, it’s hard to say.
However we hire about 100 people per year, and our crews already on the floor all did it annually for our fire ground survival program. Over the years we ran it we had probably 5000 runs total through the collapse simulator.
The number of injuries was statistically significant enough for us to stop using it. Particularly since a controlled 6” fall does not train you to be better at anything. If you’re falling through a floor it’s 8-12’ and there is no way to safely simulate that.
Anecdotally we generally had fewer injuries with our academy recruits than with our crews on the floor. Officers got hit particularly hard. It appears 55 year old elbows and shoulders do worse in something like this than 25 year old ones.
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u/not_a_mantis_shrimp May 22 '25
We also have a floor collapse simulator similar to this at our training centre. It has caused a number of injuries, dislocated elbows and shoulders, numerous sprains and a broken wrist.
The jury is out if it is a good training tool. The injury investigations don’t really show that it is a technique problem with using the simulator. There is just a reasonable chance of injury in a simulated collapse.
We have stopped using ours as the risk of injury was deemed too high for the potential training benefit.