A husband and his wife are attempting to snake out the basement floor drain. The husband sees some debris enter the back of the drain, he instinctively sticks his hand down there to clear the debris just as his wife turns the snake on. The snake impales the mans hand and pulls his arm into the drain causing his hand and arm to become stuck. This exact scenario has played out to a couple of friends of mine from 2 different departments, and you can see how this could easily happen again.

Picture of actual snake and pipe that a mans arm was extricated from.

I wanted to try to recreate this scenario in training, I thought it was a great scenario and it gave you multiple materials to cut. So I set out to build a fairly cheap prop to reenact this rescue scenario. I built a small box out of old wood that I had laying around, this would act as a form for the concrete that I was going to pour in it. I also used some left over PVC pipe that I had to make a section of drain that the arm would be stuck in. Once the PVC pipe was in place and capped the form was filled with a couple bags of quick dry cement.

After the cement is dry it was time to build the arm and auger. I use the foam in the glove trick from our previous post. I used a small spring epoxied on the end of a old hose to act as the snake. Once the finger was wrapped up in the snake I put it into the drain pipe and we were ready to drill.