20 February 2011

No Accountin' For It.

Full moon and Friday night...
I had barely finished my preflight yesterday when the phone rang dispatching us to a local hospital to transport a Grandmother with a severe head bleed.
Having finished that flight, we were rotoring home when we were dispatched to a scene...
A teenaged female had been ejected from a pickup truck after it struck a utility pole.
After carrying her to the Trauma Center we then actually made it back to our base and got caught up on our paperwork before once again being sent flying...
To another scene and another teen ejected after the vehicle in which he was riding came to a complete, sudden stop.
What is it with these seat belts that don't hold teens in the safe living space of modern vehicles?
(Just so you know for sure... that's EMS humor folks!)


I came in tonight wondering if we'd experience a repeat of last evening.
It's almost 0330 as I type this post and the telephone has not rung.
There's just no way to predict what sort of shift you're gonna have.
And that's part of what makes this job so interesting.

5 comments:

Bob Barbanes: said...

What is it with these seat belts that don't hold teens in the safe living space of modern vehicles?

All the time...ALL THE FRIGGIN' TIME...we read in the newspaper or hear on the news about an accident in which the driver/occupant was ejected - obviously not wearing a seatbelt. And it causes me to wonder: How in this day and age, when there are SO MANY examples of people being ejected from their vehicle (and usually killed in the process)...how is it that people STILL do not wear their seatbelts?! It just blows my mind, man.

My car (a 2006 Ford) emits a loud, irregular, annoying BONG-BONG-BONG-BONG if either I or my passenger fail to buckle up. I imagine that most modern cars do the same. So how or why do people ignore these reminders?

Maybe everyone who gets ejected from their vehicle in a crash should go to the hospital by ground ambulance! That's just me being cruel, of course, I don't really mean it. But jeez. How many MORE examples do we need?

CJ said...

They sure seem to think they're invulnerable, which is nothing new, but I think their attitude is... worse? They seem hell bent on doing things that will get them hurt with such a fatalistic attitude... I'm not sure what to make of it.

Sounds like a tough shift. Glad you got through it.

cjh

Old NFO said...

As long as you can fly safe, it all works... the BAD shift is when the weather sucks, and they try to launch you into questionable weather on a questionable transport... Stay Safe!

Cissy Apple said...

Obviously, these folks have not seen entire families, including infants, thrown through windshields. I witnessed that at the ripe old age of five, and it burned into my brain. Back then, cars with seatbelts were few and far between.

Had a great-aunt a few years ago that never buckled up. Then she let her elderly and very sick husband drive to a neighboring town for his doctor's appointment. He was buckled up when he passed out just coming into Loogootee, and hit a parked car. Aunt Regina was partially ejected through the windshield. Her body ended up back in the car. Her head, not so much. It ended up somewhere on Hwy 231, where some poor fool got the job of picking it up off the pavement.

The "defect" was deftly covered up by the funeral director using a pretty blue scarf tied around her neck.

cary said...

In my not-so-scientifically-supported-opinion, seatbelt laws and helmet laws and all-red time have deprived us of the one thing that would have helped all along - continued evidence for Darwin's Proof.

That is, the safety equipment has been there (number one piece of safety equipment is the brain, make sure it's engaged before anything else is!) but only the intelligent ones will use it on a regular basis. The stupid ones, the ones that need to be removed from the gene pool, have been protected by the "laws" and "improvements" (including BONG BONG BONG seatbelt warnings).