An embarassing story :)

[Timmy]

If you volunteer with the service I do work with its like clown college, seriously. Some days you just want to bang your head against the brick wall or crawl into a small hole and die then endure some of the embarrassment the volunteers find them selves in.

Just a few weeks ago we attended a motocross, there was a rather large accident on the table top jumps in front of the grand stand, officials are waving the medical flags, the hundreds of people watching on - all eyes on us, we pull up in the ambulance, lights flashing and all that jazz, my partner gets out and in front of everyone trips on a tyre and face plants hardcore on the track. So his down, we have a couple of riders down, I continue onto the track leaving him there to pick up his pride and dust him self off but how embarrassing, you could just feel the crowds awkward silence beaming down on us.

I’ll admit, an embarrassing moment. When I was first allowed to drive the ambulance when I got my licence we were called to a ‘cardiac arrest’ at an agricultural show. I decided the quickest way to take our 2 tonne GMC ambulance was straight through the sideshow alley (were all the rides and amusements are). We had a young police officer running in front of the ambulance screaming at people to move, almost at the incident location and a loud noise occurred, I’d scrapped the top of the truck against an amusement ride and made a 3 meter dint in the top of the back compartment, the crowd was screaming at us to stop and banging on the sides of the ambulance, luckily that was as far as we could get the ambulance. We dealt with the situation, the paramedics arrived and we began to extricate the patient from the side show area to the ambulance and almost rolled the stretcher between 5 of us, the patient was rather large and going across the uneven ground we just became a bit unsteady but how embarrassing! I could only imagine how much faith the bystanders had in us!

[Richard B the EMT]

Was that you I observed on a Youtube video? Actually, there's a bunch of this type stuff there, including 2 Ladder companies colliding, overturning one. Then there's the classic one of a Ladder company parked on the train tracks, tries getting off at the last instant...didn't quite make it (from a rail cam on the locomotive).

What I personally find scary is EVOC dash cam videos, both how bad some of us drive, as well as other, "civilian" drivers, and a recent training video I saw last week, of a Raleigh, SC, Tiller-man Ladder company overturning while turning the corner at too high a speed, video in co-operation with the Seattle WA FD.