Incident 26/2012 – difficult casualty extraction, Barnoldswick

The Team was paged to assist the ambulance and fire services with an incident in Barnoldswick; this wasn’t our usual sort of incident, as the task in hand was the extraction of a casualty from a building under construction.

 When we arrived at the RV there was almost 10 other Emergency Services vehicles – our Team Land Rover, a fire engine, an Ambulance Service RRV, an Ambulance, an incident support unit, an ambulance officer and four HART team vehicles.

 The casualty was located in the attic of the house, which was four floors up and was an active building site.  A couple of weeks previously, the patient had fallen down a set of cellar steps, landing with his neck on a concrete block. Whilst working in the attic yesterday he lifted some tools and then fell to the floor with serious neck pain. Upon examination, the patient had an obvious C-spine deformity, c-spine tenderness and reduced power to his left arm and left leg. As such he was treated with extreme caution to secure his spine and prevent any further injury.

The patient was immobilised on a scoop stretcher and lifted into a specialist MIBs stretcher. He was then lifted / carried down the stairs – four floors of partially built staircases and round acroprops. This took a team of 12 people, with the casualty spending some time being passed vertically, as well as on his side and rolled around obstructions. He was safely transported to the ambulance and taken off to the hospital.

Although not our normal sort of callout, it shows that as a Team we have specialist skills and equipment not always available to the statutory emergency services, and shows that we as volunteers can perform to a high professional standard.

Team members: 5

Team hours: 5