S01.E03: Next of Kin - 9-1-1

On 1/18/2018 at 1:10 AM, bilgistic said:

The bouncy house scene was crackers. I'm suspending disbelief that it would go sailing over the mountainside while weighed down with four people, or roughly 350ish pounds. At least the show acknowledged that more than one person would have to rescue the inhabitants of the bouncy house and showed the safety equipment being used.

That one was based on a real-life rescue, albeit amped up for Fox! TV! Drama! In strong winds, a bouncy castle with a large surface area could easily become a sail, so I don't chalk that one up to too much dramatic license. The rescue was actually nicely done. Roy and Johnny approve, I'm sure, although I'm still not entirely sure what the rescuers tied off onto. Stakes in the ground? Might have made more sense to tie off onto the truck.

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I wish the previews hadn't spoiled the rebar-through-the-head situation with Chimney(?). I don't understand why the truck hit him unless it was deliberate. Can someone explain that?

Trucks carrying steel and the like have a shit-ton of momentum and don't stop easily. And when they do stop suddenly, the load will shift. Rods will fly forward. There's been many an impalement of sleepy truck drivers who drive off the road carrying steel rods. The truck stops, the driver stops, the rods don't.

Personal recollection follows.

100% true story here, of a somewhat-similar accident. Toronto, back in the mid-80s. I was an overnight police-beat reporter for a newspaper named after a celestial body. Scanners in my car, cameras in the trunk, press pass, the works. I'm sitting downtown and a call tones out for a PI accident (personal injury), man impaled through the head, on the 401 way out east. Easily a half-hour drive. I start out slowly, figuring it will take them a while to remove the body, get the coroner out to pronounce, etc. A minute later, the BLS crew calls and says the patient is alive and talking, and to rush everything they have to the scene. My foot finds the accelerator, which finds the firewall in short order, wherein I discovered that the top speed of a 1981 Toyota Celica on the Don Valley Parkway is about 110 MPH.

If you are a person of delicate sensibilities, please stop reading here. If you're a twisted SOB with a truly warped sense of humour, read on, McDuff.

I get out to the scene before any other media and sure enough, Mr. Polehead is sitting in the driver's seat with a chunk of the top rail of a chain-link fence through his noggin, at about the same angle and position as it was portrayed on the show, only in his case, it entered through the front and was protruding about 5 feet behind him. He'd fallen asleep behind the wheel, veered off onto the shoulder, and kaplowie. OPP were managing traffic and I grabbed my pics of Mr. Polehead before being shooed off. Then it got "interesting."

The discussion began between Scarborough Fire and EMS on how to get him out and how to safely transport. You can imagine how tense this was for all concerned. They decided to cut the pole off with a sawzall a few feet in front and behind his head, and get him to a level-one trauma center to do the pole-ectomy. But how to transport safely was the question. Big, big FD veteran, about 400 pounds of solid muscle with no neck, who I'm sure bench-presses linebackers in his spare time, comes up in full kit. His deadpanned suggestion: cut the pole to a specific length, and hang it up in the back of the Rescue Squad box truck, like a hangar bar in a closet, and just let him dangle all the way to Sunnybrook (making the appropriate visual raggedy-dance moves). "It'll just loosen up for the docs, aye?" Everybody, and I mean everybody in earshot breaks out laughing like mad. He clapped the EMS supervisor on the back so hard he had trouble catching his breath, and he goes back to his men to keep working on the vic.

Well, they get the guy on a stretcher, get him to the ER in the ambulance, the pole-ectomy goes smoothly, and he walks out of hospital a week or two later with only a slight speech impairment and a funny walk. Miracle, really. I got my pics, but they only ran a general scene picture in the paper. I did manage to sell the image of the guy still in the car, fully impaled, to a U.S. Tabloid and made a shit-ton of money off it. Still got a tearsheet of it in my files somewhere, too, but sadly the negatives are long gone.

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