Life is not Like in the Movies

Completing the dangerous work that we do in the fire service, it is pretty easy to start thinking of yourself as some kind of hero. Periodically you get one of those calls that slams you back into some semblance of reality. We got this MVA call one night about midnight. Over the radio the dispatcher announced, “Vehicle over an embankment!” and it was way up some old mountain logging road. We finally pulled up to the scene, and sure enough, 100 feet over the road bank was a car barely hung-up on some brush. Repelling over the edge to get a closer look, we found a lady still trapped inside. We also determined that we needed to tie this vehicle off to something stable up on the road because with one false move around this car, it was going to roll further down this mountainside, possibly crushing one of us rescuers in the process. This was a challenging extrication due to the steepness and the need to stabilize the car before we could get our patient out. There were also all the hydraulic tools that needed to be winched down to us so we could pry her out while we were tethered over the edge on ropes. With some effort, I got myself wedged inside the car with the lady and ask her how she was doing. The first words out of her mouth were “What the hell took you so long to get here!” I checked my watch—12:45 AM. I told her I thought we were doing pretty well, what with getting the call at midnight, the driving time to the scene, plus all the preparation we had to do just to get down to her. She said, “Midnight??” She informed me that they had crashed at 8:00 PM. Come to find out, the drunken man with her crawled out of the wreck, clawed his way back up to the road, walked back down the mountain to their house, crawled into bed and went to sleep, woke up a few hours later feeling very sore and then remembered he had been in a wreck and had forgotten to call 911 so we could go rescue his wife. Suffice it to say, she was pissed-off. We had to extricate her from the vehicle while we were being suspended under the bottom of the car. When we were placing her into the rescue basket, she was concerned that we would drop her. The fact is, if we did drop her, she probably would have plummeted to her death down the steep mountainside. She kept screaming, “Don’t drop me! Don’t drop me!!!”

This car crash happened just a short time after the firemen’s movie “Backdraft” had come out in theaters. There is a scene where one of the actors (Bull) is holding his fallen comrade's (Axe) arm with just one hand while they both are dangling over the top of a burning pit of fire. The injured Axe longingly looks up at Bull and tells him, “Bull, just drop me, save yourself.” Bull looks intently back down at Axe and grunts, “If you go, we go.” Remembering this memorable line in the movie, I looked down intently at my injured and frightened lady and said, “Ma'am, if you go, we go.” She looked back up at me and glaringly said, “I don’t give a damn if you go, just don’t drop me!” quickly snapping me back into reality. Things in real life are not the same as in the movies.