Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [30]
We have a pair of spreaders, a huge, plierlike tool we insert into crevices on a wreck to pry the surfaces apart. It also squeezes like pliers and can compact or crush jagged flanges. Along with the cutting unit resembling crab claws, it was the extension used most often. With these tools we can take a car down until it’s only a pile of tin.
Unless circumstances dictated otherwise, the strategy we’d been using the past couple of years with trapped occupants was this: We laid a hose line in case of fire. We calmed the patients as best we could and explained what we were doing. We treated them through the openings if necessary and put blankets or tarps around them to protect them from glass and flying sparks. We stabilized the vehicle so it wouldn’t roll, usually by flattening the tires. We removed the windshield, cut the posts that held the roof on, and either folded the roof back or cut it completely off. We put notches in the outer frame at the base of the dashboard and pulled the dash away with our hydraulic tools. Often that was the point at which a firefighter climbed into the backseat to stabilize the head and neck of a patient in the front seat. We cut the doors off, cut the seat loose, pulled the steering wheel out of the way, and at this point, if not before, we were generally able to extricate the patient and slide him onto a backboard.
The driver of the rolled pickup, who had alcohol on his breath, was removed without much hassle, especially after the crew from Snoqualmie arrived to help; but the passenger had a broken femur, was pinned in the wreckage. He screamed every time our tools touched the truck. It took twenty-five minutes to extricate him.
“Dirtbags,” Ian Hjorth said. “Drunk as skunks. They killed that guy up in the trees. I hope they go to jail forever.”
We’d packed both patients from the truck into transport units and were walking up the slope to the third vehicle in the woods. Ian and I had been carrying the heavy Hurst power unit between us, Snoqualmie firefighters picking up the cables and tools and following like a wedding train. The medics had already confirmed our next patient was dead. The State Patrol had finished taking photographs and measurements. The medical examiner’s people were on scene. Our job now was to pull out the body.
“Shit,” Ian said as we set the power unit on the ground. “This looks like Stan’s truck.”
What had I been thinking? Stan talks about death all week. Stan comes to the station drunk. An hour and a half later we get a call to an MVA, and there’s a truck that looks like Stan’s with an IAFF union sticker in the window.
And yours truly doesn’t connect the dots.
I put my head and shoulders through the window until I could see his hands in the shadows on the floor. The skin was dark, the backs of the fingers covered in a waxy-looking substance.
Just like mine.
Just exactly like mine. It was Stan all right.
I couldn’t help thinking we might have saved him. We couldn’t have, but the idea wouldn’t go away. It proved to be hogwash after we dismantled the truck, because Stan’s chest and head had been crushed when the impact pushed the motor back through the fire wall. Stan was dead before we left the station.
Weeping, Karrie said, “We were just talking to him.”
We were all in shock. It hit us, as Stan would have said, like five knuckles to the snot locker. The firefighters from Snoqualmie. Even the state troopers, when they found out who it was. What made it worse was the guilt I felt over not having taken Stan under my wing earlier. I should have tapped us out of service the minute the word suicide came out of his mouth. We could have driven him to the hospital ourselves in the aid wagon.
Had I taken his truck ignition key, an option that hadn’t even occurred to me until now, he might be alive still.
The lieutenant riding the rig from Snoqualmie, a man named Meyers, came over while Ian and I were carrying Stan to the medical examiner’s gurney, and said, “This is going to be a hard one. Telling his wife.”
I placed one of Stan’s shoes next