I suppose getting a shout is an ideal excuse to leave the grass-cutting half finished…
So when my little black number starting vibrating in my pocket mid cut I was more than happy to abandon the gardening till later.
By the time I’d replaced shorts with jeans and hot footed across to the fire station, Dennis was already in and called out that we were off to an RTC, persons trapped at Kessingland.
I slapped my tally into the drivers position and got all my fire kit stowed on the pump. Handheld radios onboard, tip sheet in hand, main scheme radio switched on, fire up the engine, blues on and wait as the crew start tumbling in through the front door.
With five onboard I turned out onto Normanston Drive and within a few hundred metres we encountered the traffic backed up all the way from the railway line gates in Oulton Broad. Nothing for it but to proceed down the outside of the queue right the way to the line gates which were shut waiting for theNorwich bound train. So there we were, at the mercy of the trains, waiting for the barriers to raise. And sitting across the other side of the tracks was John, one of our crew, who hadn’t been able to beat the line gates and make it to the station for the turnout.
Once we cleared that little obstacle we made good progress through the afternoon traffic, heading out of town past Lowestoft South Fire Station.
It wasn’t long before we hit the tailback from the incident. We passed through the Police cordon and headed up to the other emergency vehicles.
Once I’d got my fire kit on I joined our crew as the the worst affected vehicle was being winched from a ditch at the side of the road. In the middle of this I got a call from Dennis on the handheld radio to make my way back to him ASAP. We’d been tasked with a new job…
As we’d arrived at the incident we had passed a car pulled up on the verge that had got just minor damage. It now seemed like we may need to take the roof off to enable the extraction of the female passenger, who was medically trapped.
I reversed the pump closer to this car and started to set up an equipment dump – combi tool, hydraulic hose, generator, sharp protectors, toolkit and more.
The Air Ambulance had by now landed in a nearby garden. The doctor and paramedic had examined the male driver of the car from the ditch and were now coming over to check our female passenger.
To save cutting the roof from the car the doctor was happy for us to remove all the rear seats from the car and use a long board to remove the passenger. This was much quicker than having to remove the roof…
Our casualty was now in the car of the Ambulance Service and our job was done. Time to pack everything away, watch the Air Ambulance leave the scene with one casualty aboard and then a hot debrief for the fire crews.
With the time now approaching 5pm traffic was stacked up coming out of Lowestoft as drivers tried to work out the best way to get around the RTC scene. And we had to do likewise and return through Lowestoft at a much more sedate pace that that at we came…