By Justin Schorr
As a firefighter and paramedic my responsibilities at the scene of a motor vehicle collision can vary from fire suppression to patient care to extrication.
When arriving at the scene of these incidents we note the traffic conditions, close lanes for safety and approach the vehicles to determine the extent of injuries. Each paramedic has their own method for approaching these incidents. Some go to the drivers first, others to the larger vehicle.
I have one of the odder techniques, or so I am told. At each and every incident involving a vehicle, before I do anything, I drop down and look underneath the cars. Here’s why.
It was a warm afternoon, almost hot and uncomfortable, when my rural fire department was dispatched to a reported truck in a ditch. It was a common call for that area. Dogs or cows would go running across the narrow roadways and swerving to avoid them left you in the ditch. Unfortunately, it was also not uncommon for those drivers to be inebriated to some extent.
It is said that complacency kills in the fire service. Letting your guard down and expecting the expected can get you killed in a fire or working on the side of the road.
At this incident, the driver of the larger tree trimming truck is uninjured, but it is a good 50 feet off the road, the front wheels stuck down in the ditch with its chipper trailer resting oddly on its side.
The police responded and took the driver into custody and soon after a wrecker arrived to pull the truck back up to the roadway. He noted some strange discoloration beneath the chipper and we all assumed it was oil or some other kind of fuel. The chipper was removed and the truck began to be pulled out of the ditch.
The shoes were the first thing we saw. Bright Yellow running shoes. The legs attached to them were barely recognizable as we shouted for the wrecker to stop and then ran in to see what was happening. Beneath the truck we found a man in his mid 40‘s who we would later learn was an avid runner. The driver of the truck would also recount the events of the afternoon as follows: He finished a job on the other side of town and stopped for a few beers at the casino. He recalls dozing off and awaking just in time to see something big and green in the road, then it was gone, then he was in the ditch.
The runner was wearing a bright green T-shirt with the logo of a local sandwich shop on it. Best we can figure the driver fell asleep and veered off the roadway towards the runner, hit him and dragged him down into the ditch to rest completely concealed by the tree truck.
The counselors told us he was likely dead on impact or at least died soon after we arrived and that no efforts we could have applied would have been any help. But, I always wonder what may have been different had I looked under the truck first before being distracted by the inebriated driver.
Nowadays even on the most basic of vehicle involved incidents the first thing I do is drop into a push-up position and scan beneath the cars, always wondering if I’m going to see a pair of bright yellow shoes no one else knew was there.
