vonirkinshtine said:
I would say this brush truck crew got a little excited when they pulled up. Still, excellent knock-down. Thankfully the driver was able to exit under his own power before the fire extended into the cockpit.
This unusual crash reminds me of a similar incident that my standby ambulance service in Lubbock worked in 1973. During the car races one Saturday night they had a "daredevil" show during intermission. We had one guy who was trying the ramp-jump as in this picture, and he crashed just like in this one, but he didn't catch fire. He was very shaken up but didn't require transportation. Just a few minutes later another guy was using the same ramps; but this time it was with a motorcycle trying to jump over a few cars. This guy came down on his front tire rather than the back, which flipped him over. He had a broken collar bone and was transported.
My service worked 99% of the sporting events in and around Lubbock for 22 years, and during that time we had only one fatalitiy. That was in 1989, when a sprint car came into turn 3 and blew a tire, which catapulted the car into the retaining wall by the pits. People were forever standing near that fence even though they were continuously warned not to. When the sprint car hit the wall it also hit a utility pole, breaking it at ground level. It swivled up and caught a young guy who was trying to run away in the back of the head. Needless to say, he had massive head injuries and internal injuries. We called for a helicopter but they couldn't respond, so we headed for the closest facility, which was a small orthopedic hospital. We had to suction and do CPR all the way in; but he was pretty well gone when we loaded. As I said, in our 22 years at that track, it was the first fatality we had to work and only the second in the history of that track.
Here in Midland there's a small dragstrip that's been open for a few years not far from where I live. Last summer they had a unusual crash where a dragster crashed into the back wall of the facility. The driver lost both feet in the accident and was airlifted out. This track has its own ambulance, but uses off-duty Midland
FD medics. They have a no-transport policy, whereby they stabilize and care for the patient until a city truck gets there. I've noticed this sort of policy in place the past few years at this track and the circle track as well. Their logic is that if they transport, the track has to shut down in their absecnce, or let the drivers run at their own risk. We always transported......period.....whether they had to shut down or not. When we eventually grew in size we managed to keep two ambulances at each event, unless we had multiple events at the same time which would spread us too thin, and that worked well for a very long time!
I would also mention that
EMS care for sporting events has really done well over the past 20 years. Once-upon-a-time we were just considered "ambulance attendants"....and to that end we got a bad time from an elderly ER nurse when we came in with a patient fully packaged back in the early '70s, not long after the incident I describe above. In 1973 we had just gotten Emergency Care Attendant training here in Texas: the forerunner to EMT certs, with EMT certification in 1974 and the first paramedics around 1975. That nurse mentioned above was absolutely horrified that we had packaged the patient, and when we tried to give her vitals, she said, "Don't tell me anything about this patient, you're no damned doctor."
And in Lubbock, we'd been doing proper c-spine precautions, etc., since 1970. The old nurse was absolutely horrified when I told her that within the next couple of years we'd be doing a lot more. Now look where emergency medicine has gone! These guys do a great job!
