FRIDAY FORUM: Origin Stories - The Multi-Loop Rescue Strap
We’re finally starting our series on the origin stories of ARS products, and we’re beginning where it all started, the Multi-Loop Rescue Strap.
It was 2012, and I was in SOC School at the Philadelphia Fire Dept, one component of which was a fairly hellacious week of RIT and survival. Working with webbing under high stress, zero visibility, and fire gloves (low dexterity) we quickly discovered that all the fancy methods simply don’t work and the best you can do is a girth hitch. If so, why am I messing with this long loop of webbing? Let me make something that will girth hitch well that works better with gloves on?
The result was photo 2, a very simple length of webbing with reinforced end handles with 8mm rope inside the webbing, tied in a knot to keep it in place. This worked great, until we started doing vertical lifts. The extra tail left beyond the hitch varied on the size of the victim, and if too long, made clearing window sills difficult. This thing should be adjustable.
The result was photo 3. My wife can sew and graciously entertained my experimentation. We added larger handles with thicker rope inside, an anchor ring at the midpoint for rigging options and improved tactile reference, and we added loops every 8 inches, a vital improvement that made the strap adjustable. This design caught on, and it was launched with minimal changes when ARS went live in 2016.
We added the Carabiner version a few years later by request. I always carried the ring version, intending to add a carabiner if I needed it, until I discovered that it was more difficult than expected under the extreme stress and exhaustion of a real-world firefighter mayday. I now carry both, the ring for tech rescues and the carabiner for the fireground.
The MLRS is what started it all, and we’re intensely proud and humbled by the impact it has made in your hands. We strove to find simplicity under stress, and I think we found it.
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