An inside look at Chattanooga-Hamilton County Rescue Service’s Cave/Cliff Unit

Anybody want to be a hero?

If so, Brad Tipton would love to meet you. Tipton is captain of the Cliff/Cave Unit of the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Rescue Service (CHCRS), which he describes as the best qualified and most talented rescue team in North America, one called in whenever somebody’s in trouble and nobody knows how to get them out.

“Rescue’s always been the unit that does the stuff that nobody else does,” he said.

This includes, but is not limited to, rescuing people trapped underwater, lying broken at the bottom of cliffs, buried alive or stranded in flooded caves. There has been at least one instance of raising from the dead.

Seriously, Tipton cannot talk about his team without using the word “miracle.”

Now Tipton’s in the market for new heroes, and he goes from civic group to outdoor club presenting CHCRS’s history of derring-do and making his pitch. “We’re always actively recruiting, always looking for strong young folks, but we’ll even take the strong old folks,” he said.

If you’re thinking of signing up, bear in mind that the pay sucks: $0. And working conditions? If Tipton says “miracle” a lot, he gets equal mileage out of “misery” and “suffer.”

Still, the fact remains there’s a certain cachet to this hero biz. Why else would television keep staging reenactments of the rescue team’s more spectacular successes?

Here’s a quote combining the two elements, where blood, sweat and tears meet glory in one sentence: “It was a very life-changing moment when you realized that someone you fully expected to not survive did, and it was because of the efforts of all these people who just showed up unpaid to freeze and suffer.”

That’s Tipton describing the first really sensational rescue he participated in after joining CHCRS as a 19-year-old seeking adventure, that of a construction worker buried alive in December 1998. “Initially, we thought we were going out there to dig up a dead guy,” said Tipton.

Darby Patrick, 26, had been laying sewer pipe on Highway 58 when the trench collapsed, burying him beneath what newspapers reported as five, six, and 15 feet of dirt, respectively. (Tipton, who was there, pegged it at 20.) However many feet, it was enough to crush Patrick’s internal organs and bones, necessitating multiple later surgeries, including the amputation of one leg.

But it didn’t quite kill him, because he was able to breathe through a sewer pipe. “By sticking his head in that pipe, he saved his own life,” said Tipton.

Firefighters tried to dig Patrick out but had to stop when their efforts led to another, deeper cave-in. “So they called us,” he said.

Enter Chattanooga-Hamilton County Rescue. Slowly, methodically, the rescuers excavated first Patrick’s head, then, inch by inch, the rest of him, meanwhile treating his wounds, shock and hypothermia in situ, finally airlifting him to Erlanger at 5 a.m. The whole operation took over 15 hours in single-digit temperatures.

“It was a miserable, miserable long night,” said Tipton. “But to see a guy you expected to pull out as a corpse come out alive was absolutely incredible.” Hooked, Tipton stayed on to become captain of the team in 2011.

Somewhere along the line he also became the unofficial CHCRS historian, compiling decades’ worth of records into a concise presentation which he shares here with The Pulse.

The Chattanooga Hamilton County Rescue Service was originally formed as a volunteer “Life-Saving Squad” sponsored by the American Red Cross in 1937, when, as Tipton noted: “You didn’t have ambulance services, you didn’t have fire services, you didn’t have basic rescue services, water rescue services, none of those things.”