Avoiding & Treating Hypothermia

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm going to talk about how to avoid and treat hypothermia. First of all hypothermia is when your core temperature drops so low that you start loosing coherence and your body actually starts shutting down. To avoid it first of all you need to have the proper equipment such as a jacket, a sweatshirt, being dry. Getting wet is the cause of hypothermia. If you get wet and it is cold outside, you need to stop and build a fire and get warmed back up. The symptoms of hypothermia are pretty simple. If you see the person you know has gotten wet and they are acting a little funny like they will lose coherence, kind of start wandering off. You may have to be like hey, hey, pay attention. Also their lips will get blue and they will be shaking a lot like this. Now if you are by yourself and you know that you have gotten hypothermia and if you are still coherent enough to deal with it, here is what you have to do. First of all you have to stop and build a fire quickly as you can before you get too cold. And then once you have your fire built, you are going to want to put on every warm piece of clothing that is dry that you have. Get inside a shelter if you can and curl up in the smallest ball that you can. What this will do it conserves your core heat in here and if you have all your clothes on and a rain jacket, you can start warming up if you are near a fire. Now if you are with a partner and they've got hypothermia, slightly different. So if Sarah here gets hypothermia and I notice she is trembling and her lips are blue, first thing I am going to do is stop and start building a fire and start getting her warm. I am going to give her my warm layers, everything I can spare. If it is warm enough, I will just give her everything I've got to wear. And then you are going to need to share body heat so you just give her a nice big hug and get real close. You want to make sure that your core is close to their chest as well so that way they will get the heat from your body. Your body actually puts out quite a bit of BTU's and you can use that fire and clothing to warm up your partner and solve the hypothermia problem. "