chain gangs and bucket brigades

[Arnold Zwicky]

"bucket brigade" is semantically related, but in my experience (and,
apparently, the experience of the compilers of AHD3) it refers only to
conveying water to fight fires, hence to conveying material
towards/into a location.  but several extensions would be natural:
conveying something other than water; responding to some disaster
other than fire; conveying material away from/out of a location.  with
all three of these extensions (preserving only the joint conveying and
the response to a disaster), "bucket brigade" could have been used to
describe the rescue operation in arundel high street.  (in a further
extension, the expression could refer to situations other than rescues
- to any situation where hand-to-hand passing offers an advantage
over individuals carrying material over some distance.)

there are many real-life situations where person-to-person conveying
is used: removing rubble from collapsed or exploded structures,
passing sandbags to levees, removing sodden books from a flooded
library (as happened here at stanford two years ago), for example.
how are these cooperative rescue operations referred to in newspaper
reports?

i'm writing from home rather than from my office/library, so i
have only a few reference works to hand...  but is "bucket brigade"
used in british english?  AHD3 has it, but NSOED does not (though
it has other "bucket" idioms).

my off-the-cuff response to "chain gang" in these rescue situations is
that it's an instance of a "private meaning" (the semantic sibling of
the classical malapropism), like the examples in my Mistakes booklet
("Indo-" meaning 'southern, lower'; "ritzy" meaning 'in poor taste).
(to these i would now add - tying this discussion back to an earlier
one on this list - an instance of "to coin a phrase" clearly used to
mean 'to quote a phrase').  but of course i could be wrong; from a
single example, you can't tell whether you're looking at an
inadvertent error, an idiosyncratic usage, or a dialect feature.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)