……….Fire Engineering, January 1954
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A FORT PIERCE, FLORIDA, EMT WAS REQUIRED to have his left leg amputated below the knee Tuesday night following a violent crash.
WPTV
Fort Pierce police spokeswoman Audria Moore issued a statement:
An ambulance, driven by St. Lucie County Firefighter William Hines, was at the intersection of Virginia Avenue and 25th Street to make a left turn onto 25th Street, when a Nissan SUV, driven by Germaine Lindor, 63, of the 2600 block of NW Hatches Harbor Road, Port St. Lucie, entered the intersection and collided with the passenger side of the ambulance.
The impact tipped the ambulance over on its driver side and caused it to spin around and skid on its side for about 50 feet. The SUV continued traveling north on 25th Street until it came to a stop.
The driver of the SUV, Lindor was killed immediately on impact. The driver of the ambulance was treated at the hospital and released. The EMT Chris Doyle, who was in the passenger seat took the brunt of the impact and had to be extricated from the wreckage. His left leg was so badly mangled that the surgeons at the hospital had to amputate it below the knee.
WPTV
One eyewitness to the crash told the Fort Pierce Tribune: “This is a 45 (mph zone) and it was doing twice that, no problem at all. Ninety, easy,” Kelly said. “I saw her 50 feet away from the intersection. I couldn’t believe that she wasn’t slowing down. … Hit that hump, it seemed like her truck left the ground and jumped up in the air and hit the ambulance.”
A police investigator said that they have not yet determined the speed of the SUV, but that the debris field and impact results indicate that it was “substantial.”
WPBF-TV filed this video report from the accident scene:
WPEC-TV has more HERE.
A CONSTRUCTION CRANE COLLAPSED WEDNESDAY MORNING ONTO a scaffolding in the Saxony-Anhalt region of Germany. The accident buried and trapped about a dozen workers under the debris and in the mud flats below.
MDR
They were working on a 6-mile-long causeway for the ICE, the high-speed rail line, that is being built over a flood plain that has mud and standing water on it. It is not yet known why it happened, but the crane suddenly tipped over and crashed onto the work scaffold for the bridge which is about 40 ft. above the ground level. Altogether, about 1,000 tons of equipment and scaffolding were covering the trapped workers.
DPA
The area is inaccessible to wheeled vehicles, so the FD had to special-call a water rescue team to bring inflatable boats and a hovercraft to get access to the injured workers. According to the police, five workers were rescued with minor injuries while another six were trapped beneath the wreckage for some time before rescue services were able to dig them out. Most of them suffered serious but non-life threatening injuries.
MDR
MDR has a video report showing the collapse scene and rescue efforts HERE.
MDR’s print story is HERE.
Sourced by Christian Lewalter
Dave Statter over at STATter911 has one of the niftiest gadgets going over at his website. Near the top of the right sidebar is a video box that has a set of three video thumbnails just below the player. One of his colleagues at WUSA-TV Ch. 9, Emily Cyr is constantly on the watch for fire/EMS-related news videos that come across the newswire and if they fit the blogsite profile, they are entered into the video loop that runs in that player. At any given moment there are 30 videos loaded and you can preview them by just clicking on the > button to skim the thumbnails. Almost every day new videos are added, and therefore older ones are removed, and you have a constantly-changing selection to choose from.
Since I don’t have the luxury of a staff of hundreds (Ok, dozens) to do this kind of stuff, I can only sit in envy while I skim through the daily video library selections. It’s a great way to cover some current happenings – right after you get your Firegeezer fix for the day – and I hope you check it out, if you haven’t already.
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Shame on me…I meant to point out that yesterday was just two weeks ahead of St. Patrick’s Day. That means the many fire department pipe and drum bands are getting ready for this year’s parades that take place during the middle of the month. And it kicks off the marching season for most of them after the winter layoff. So get ready for some good outdoor entertainment in the next couple of weeks.
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It was just a little over two years ago in January 2008 that we first told you (HERE) about an unusual house for sale in San Francisco. Back in 1974 a pair of artists, Robert and Marilyn Katzman bought a decommissioned firehouse (Engine 33) from the city and converted it into a home. The all-redwood constructed building still had the pole and some other amenities in it, so they kept the FD theme in their remodeling. A few years later they bought a 1955 Mack pumper, converted the hose bed into a 15-seat passenger area and began running a history-tour guide service.
Our article was prompted by the Katzman’s decision to put the firehouse, pumper, and tour business up for sale as a package offering for $3.3 million. They made this promotional video for the sale that gives a nice tour of the firehouse:
We bring this up today because we have learned that the Katzmans, who are anxious to retire and start taking it easy, have just reduced the price of their unique home by a whopping 70%. But they have separated the real estate from the tour business and are now offering the old engine house alone for $975,000. Don’t quote me, but I am guessing that includes the fire memorabilia collection as well.
The tour business is being offered separately for $249,000.
Before you start calling your financial manager to see if you can swing the deal, let’s get this equipment checked out. I need to get some more coffee started. See you back in the day room.
Truth Tellers begins at Part One HERE.
Previous episode Part Thirty is HERE.
Part Thirty-One
Capt. Finbar Lonnigan started to feel for the first time that progress was being made in this mudpit of a case. The pawnshop fire seemed to be clearing up and the burned body at Antony Spinoza’s house was probably identified. He’d know in a couple of days after the DNA comparisons were processed.
Danny was making some headway at Spinoza’s house, locating the area where it started, but the cause was elusive. Charley was still in the office, doing his computer stuff. So Finney spoke up, “Hey Charley…..zip on over to give Danny a hand, would you? I wanna get this cause-of-fire wrapped up quick.”
“Sure, Cap.” Charley got up and started out the door.
“Gosh,” Finney thought to himself, “I might even make it home for dinner on time tonight.”
Feeling confident, he picked up the phone and called Mayrie. He let it ring 10 or 12 times….no answer.
Read Part Thirty-Two HERE.
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IN LATE NOVEMBER 2008 A SILO FIRE in Worms, Germany, led to an explosion that trapped one of the volunteer FF’s in one of the grain silo’s and covered under several concreted slabs that had been blown loose from the blast. The firefighter was entombed for four days before a successful retrieval was made.
From the Firegeezer REPORT HERE:
He was entombed near the top of the malted grain storage silo over 100 ft. above the ground and trapped under 2 tons of concrete panels that had collapsed from the top when an explosion occurred during a fire operation.
Due to the instability of the damaged silo and the precariousness of the debris, retrieval of the as-yet-unidentified firefighter was delayed until a specialist team was able to cut a 6 ft. by 10 ft. hole through one of the concrete panels while they were suspended from a crane platform/basket.
After the panel was breached, a 5-man aerial rescue team from the Mannheim Fire Brigade was able to remove the firefighter and finally bring him down to the ground.
Today it was reported in Allegemeine Zeitung that the fireground operations manager Peter Jung, 42, has taken his own life in a suicide. Jung was one of four firefighters who were critically injured in the explosion and has since been confined to a wheelchair, a paraplegic. These two related LODD’s are the first times in the history of the Wormser Feuerwehr that they have had line-of-duty deaths.
With assistance from Christian Lewalter.
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