Breaking & Entering
May 6th, 2006
It’s early evening and you just know it’s going to be a busy night. It’s a warm, Friday evening and the first patient had been successfully transported to hospital, with S-T segment elevation increasing by the second. The radio is busy, indicating that there’s a lot of crews with a lot to say when the next job comes through - female in her 70s fallen over, can’t get up.
This is a fairly common occurence, and it usually ends up with Florence or Doris who has taken a tumble and can’t get up again. Carers are sometimes there, boasting about their ‘no-lift policy’, or maybe an elderly partner who has tried to help but has admitted defeat and call us. Failing that, we are sometimes given a keysafe number which opens a secure box attached to the outside of the house with a set of keys in. But at this address, we had none of the above.
Peering through the letterbox, we could see our lady sat on the floor, apparently uninjured, telling us we’d have to “take the door off”. She informed us that noone else had a set of keys and gave us the phone number of a relative. I called the relative (which is something I don’t like doing as I had to use my own phone and I don’t know how to withhold my own number!) who told me noone has any keys, and feel free to “take the door off”. That was all me and my crewmate needed to go back to the ambulance and get the ‘light rescue kit’.
Out came the hammer and crowbar and I set about establishing where the locks were. There appeared to be just one Yale lock denying us entry so we thought this should be fairly easy. It wasn’t long before we had changed our minds, and had given up on just kicking. The crowbar was introduced to give the lock a little more encouragement and with a combination of kicking, hammering and levering, the door sprung open with a loud cracking of wood.
It soon became apparently that our lady on the floor wasn’t injured as we had originally thought and we set about the task of getting her up and into her chair. She refused hospital treatment - she didn’t require it - and set about keeping abreast of her soap operas while we took a look at the door. It turned out that the itself door was relatively unscathed by our attack, but the door frame itself had split. But this left us with the dilemma of what to do next. We had no means to fix the door as our light rescue kit is only designed for breaking things, not fixing them. We spoke to ambulance control who said they would contact the police and get back to us. The police dispatched their door fixing person but were unable to give an ETA, so there was nothing more to do other than make our lady who was now much more comfortable in her own chair a cup of tea and sit back watching the the soaps.
After Emmerdale, Coronation Street and Eastenders had all been and gone, the door guy turned up. It wasn’t long before he had made good the frame and we were good to go. Our on scene time was only 2½ hours…
Entry Filed under: Work