Cold Water Survival Training

Cold water survival training can be very important not only for rescue personnel, but also for individuals who one day may find themselves in an emergency situation where this type of training could save their lives. Cold water survival involves a lot of details, but the main focus is always to keep the core body temperature up and fight off hypothermia. There are many different organizations and centers that offer cold water survival training.

  1. Issues Addressed

    • Cold water survival training has to focus on multiple issues, including prevention, understanding how the body is shutting down in cold water, and how to prevent severe hypothermia or death once out of the water. Courses often require time immersed in cold water, under medical and professional supervision, to get a firsthand experience on the effects of cold water and what to expect in those conditions.

    What Is Core Temperature?

    • Core temperature is the temperature at which a body can function normally. When the body's core temperature gets too low because of hypothermia, a person can go unconscious and even die. Core temperature is (and the human body is) like a car engine: if the engine gets too hot or too cold, it breaks and the car is dead. The same idea with the human body: if the body gets too hot or too cold, it's fatal.

    Prevention

    • Prevention is a major part of cold water survival. This includes training on what types of clothes to wear and being aware of how it doesn't have to be winter for cold water to be fatal.

    Treatment

    • Hypothermia is the main danger from cold water, and is the condition that occurs when a person's core body temperature falls to dangerous levels. Treatment of hypothermia is therefore a major part of cold water survival training. A person just out of cold water needs to immediately strip out of wet clothes (this is even true in winter or in the Arctic), and use any means available to warm up. This could be exercising, such as doing jumping jacks, or it could be wrapping up in an emergency sleeping bag, or even using person-to-person contact and using the healthy person's body heat to warm the hypothermia victim.

    Who Offers Training?

    • There are many places and organizations that offer cold water survival training. Various survival workshops will offer this training, as will certain first-aid classes. Depending on geography, various types of survival training are very easy to come by, and some states will have classes offered by their Department of Natural Resources or equivalent organization. Many organizations are always looking for additional search and rescue volunteers, too.