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.