Someone Hit My Station?

The tones went off at oh dark thirty. I must have been still in my sleepy daze because I thought I heard the tones for a traffic accident and my station address. Did someone really hit my station?!

I jumped into my bunker pants and grabbed my jacket. I looked out the windows on the apparatus bay doors to look and see if there was anything right out front. Nothing. My captain had checked the front door on his way to the rig. Again, nothing.

We pulled out of the station and saw a vehicle that had crashed into building down the block. I guess the 911 caller used our station as the reference when reporting the location of the accident.

The car had crossed oncoming traffic lanes, hit a power pole and then went head long into a cinder block building, oddly enough, an auto repair shop. The woman that had been driving (term used loosely) was just about the legal drinking age. And she was drunk. Plastered.

She was still wearing her seatbelt and the front airbags had deployed. My engineer immediately went for the car battery (disconnecting it helps to reduce the chance of another airbag going off and injuring us). I poked my head in the car and turned off the vehicle. I also placed it into park and set the emergency brake.

While trying to stay out of the airbag deployment zones as much as possible I did a quick assessment. I noted that the patient had a fractured right arm and that she was bleeding on her right leg. AMR was on scene and getting the backboard ready. Their EMT grabbed c-spine and I applied the collar. Once she was out of the car and onto the backboard we were able to do a strip and flip (this is where all of the patients clothes are removed to look for any injuries that may not have been so obvious). We found that the young woman had managed to break the bones in her lower leg and now they were protruding through the skin. This was the source of the blood I found earlier.

With the patient packaged and on her way to the ER we were free to make sure the vehicle wasn't leaking any fluids. Since we had already disconnected the battery there wasn't anything else for us to do. We headed back to the barn to try and get some more shut eye.

No sooner had we stripped out of our turnouts then the phone rang. It was dispatch saying that PD was requesting are presence on the scene of the accident we just left. Evidently the car was pinned against a power box of some sort.

We walked back over and looked. The car wasn't against a box. In fact, it had bounced back off of the wall and wasn't touching anything. And PD said that they didn't ask for us. Maybe dispatch was bored.

No Good Deed

No good deed goes unpunished.....


So assuming that there was an actual need to place the patients in C-Spine (which I highly doubt) you're trying to tell me that the paramedics there couldn't find a way to extricate the victims from a perfectly good car? If they can't remove someone from a perfectly intact car does this mean they do a full auto-extrication on every traffic accident? What a fun job for the firefighters!

All I can say is if the insurance company doesn't cover the cost of the vehicle the ambulance company should.

Her Seat Belt Trap

It was a lazy Saturday afternoon. The rain that had been coming down for several days now had mellowed out everyone and things were quiet. Some of us were on our safety nap, others were on the computer and others still were watching the glowy box. That's when the phone rang (if there was a way to may a ringing phone sound go off right now it would be great but since I can't, use your imagination).

I picked up the phone and discovered that it was the ranger down the road. He said that he had found something interesting. Someone had gotten themselves stuck in their seat belt and had stopped by the state park to get help. He had just sent them our way.

Out in front of our station pulled up a small SUV. There were three women in it, a grandmother, mother and daughter. The young woman in back had decided to lay down to sleep while on their drive. Thinking 'safety first' she decided to wrap the seat belt around her waist in a manner similar (but more knotted) to the girl in the above photo. She then stretched out on the back seat. 

When she awoke she sat back up. This is when she learned something about seat belts. When pulled all the way out, the seat belt pretensioner (#47 in the drawing below) will only allow the belt to retract (don't believe me, go try it out on your car). This is done so that the belt can be used to strap down car seats. When she sat up she unknowingly cinched the belt tight, trapping her.

Her mom and grandmother were good sports about the entire situation. They laughed and made fun of their daughter the entire time. We tried to slide, push, pull and contort this poor girl in every way imaginable to get her free. Once we exhausted our Tetris skills we decided something else would have to be done. 

Using the vast knowledge of automotive design that all firefighters have (ok, I really just followed the belt until I found a bolt, #40 in this drawing, that I could take off) I found the point at which the seat belt bolts into the frame of the vehicle and decided that was our best course of action. Do you have any idea how long it takes to unbolt something like that when you can only turn the bolt 1/8 of a turn at a time. 

A few minutes later we had our victim freed and and the vehicle put back together. 

While looking for the picture of someone twisted up in the seat belt I noticed that almost all the videos and photographs of people that have been stuck are of women. I'm sure there's a joke in there some where, I'm just not sure I want to make it....