So scene! The hero is looking for survivors in a battle-torn city. She comes across one in a 'shaky' broken down building. The survivor is pinned under a wooden beam and is gravely injured but alive. The hero is obviously not strong enough to move the beam and the building itself may fall at any second. What is the best way to save the survivor? Note: The sacrifice of the hero is key here... Im... just having a horrible time thinking of how to pull this off. So... you thoughts, guys?
Buildings come in all shapes and sizes...I'd expect a typical suburban house in the US to be wooden-framed and relatively light. A combination of levers/pulleys and ingenuity should do it. A typical suburban house in the UK would be brick-built, and significantly heavier, although the weight pressing on the support beams would depend on whether the mortar joining the bricks had fractured in the accident, and whether there was still a complete wall on top, or just a pile of loose bricks. If the latter, a lot of energy chucking bricks aside, if the former you'd need to find a way (a sledge-hammer and a lot of swinging would do it) to fracture the bricks into a pile of loose ones. City buildings (especially sky-scrapers) are more likely to have concrete/steel lintels, etc., and for the walls to be similarly robust. You're not going to remove a survivor without serious jacking equipment (think fire brigade kit here) or amputating the trapped part of the body. Apropos the amputation, there is a very definite time limit (hours, NOT days!) before any trapped limb becomes necrotic through lack of blood flow, and without amputation the victim will die of infection from this. You may do better having their escape route cut off, to obviate the medical complications arising from this, then you've just got the problem of keeping the victim alive by passing water down a narrow tunnel, then the problem - with a less pressing time limit - of digging them out. Why is the hero looking for survivors? Did she expect to just find them hanging around? Either they're going to be trapped, in which case why didn't she take some equipment with her? Or they're not going to be trapped, and most will either have formed into looting gangs who will attack anybody who isn't with them, or into some sort of self-defence force which will be suspicious of a "tourist" who's just looking for survivors. Anybody else will have fallen victim to the gangs.
A bullet to the head? Seriously though, given the situation I don't see how the hero could save the survivor AND sacrifice themselves. A falling building, crumbling or otherwise is a huge mess and if one goes down the other will likely. As it was stated above, it would take equipment to move the beam and if the building is going to fall at any moment, well then they are both screwed. I would say rework the scene a little and either make the beam smaller, maybe the person only got their foot caught and needed help, or change that idea to something that gives you more room to work
Shadowfax and Doctore. Thank you for your reply. Starting with Shadow; the lever/pulley is somewhat what a friend of mine just said I should do. From the debris I can have her fine a pipe to lift the beam enough for the civi to move out. Then again, the whole aspect of the civi being crushed from the beam lies on the table. As for why she's looking; she's part of a rescue team. She has supplies to treat injured but nothing to help her move heavy objects. I'm starting to believe that maybe Doctore is right. The scene is pitted to much against her with little hope of the outcome I was looking for. May be time to go back to the drawing board... Thank you, guys.