Brody's Page

A few things came into play on that one. First, the brothers from Lawton had only been trained to the Ops. Level and this was a 10-14 ft. deep, intersecting trench. The trench intersections were further complicated by the portion where the two parts of the "T" was widened to accomodate a Manhole cover, (Hope that makes sense). The second portion was LFD didn't have enough shoring material and needed help with more of that. They are very squared away people, it was just an extremely complicated operation. It had a shear wall collapse that pinned the victim to the floor of the trench horizontally (lieing down), only his head was visible when the operation started. The shear wall was basically a 16K dirt clod. Once we shored up the trench and as we attempted to dig the victim from under the clod, secondary collapses from the clod itself occured which meant we were continually having to build custom types of shores to accomodate the cavern that was being formed over the patient. Even though we were trying to dig under the victim and not disturbe the clod, these collapses were still occuring. Thankfully we had two good paramedics who were up on their Crush Syndrome protocols. The victim was alert and talking to us the entire time. As the clod continued to disentegrate we ended up using our dirt vac to expidite his removal. There were all sorts of other complications, such as he was lying face down, which meant if we put a C-Collar or Half-back on him, he couldn't breath, As we shored against the clod it would collapse back due to voids we couldn't see, etc. 14 hrs. and 45 minutes later we got him out. He lost a foot but he's alive.