By MariAn Gail Brown
Connecticut Post Online
DERBY, Conn. — It wasn’t your usual rescue Tuesday morning after an injured woman became stranded on the city’s Greenway.
A specially equipped, all-terrain vehicle was dispatched by Storm Engine Company’s Ambulance & Rescue Company.
The unidentified woman suffered a fractured arm while walking the narrow, 2-mile long trail that hugs the Housatonic River between Derby and Shelton.
The ambulance company received the ATV through an $18,000 grant from US Tobacco in Greenwich.
The 6 X 6 Ranger vehicle is outfitted with a backboard and medical equipment to handle emergencies in tight places where traditional ambulances can’t travel has been used in more than 20 rescues, said Thomas Lenart, chief of the Storm Engine Company Ambulance & Rescue Company. “It serves our needs very well.”
Lenart calls the acquisition of the ATV one of “the best ones” for his ambulance company.
“We had to compete for the grant with emergency organizations throughout the United States,” he said, adding that a video produced by the ambulance company, showing how popular the riverwalk is for walkers or bicycle riders and why standard methods of delivering emergency medical services don’t work there, helped gain them the grant money.
“The Greenway is great, but nobody thought at the time that it was in the planning and the building stage, no one thought about how emergency medical services would get to them,” Lenart said. “With the amount of exercise that goes on on this greenway, it’s only natural that there would be injuries.”
Storm’s ATV has also been used to assist injured people at Osbornedale Park, Witek Park and at Derby High School to reach places where traditional EMS vehicles can’t travel.
The rescue ATV works best on rough terrain, Lenart said, adding that it also saves emergency medical crews precious time.
Lenart said if the ambulance did not have the ATV Tuesday, ambulance crews “would have had to take all of our equipment, place it on a stretcher” and walk to the patient, approximately one mile into the walking path.”
He said that would have taken about eight minutes or more to reach the woman, before putting her on a stretcher and carrying her off the trail.
“This means that an ill or injured person will spend approximately half an hour or more in the elements,” Lenart said, adding that thanks to the ATV, an emergency medical service crew reached the woman quickly had transported her to Griffin Hospital in less than 10 minutes.
The woman’s name and condition weren’t available Tuesday night.