Old Incident Reports, Part One

I was going through an old folder found in a desk drawer in my office and found a bunch of old incident reports. When I say old, I mean at least 10 years old. I opened the folder and blew dust off it like Indiana Jones. Old. Reading some of the reports put a smile on my face and reading others made me embarrassed. Deeply embarrassed, as a matter of fact. Reading some of those reports now, I feel like I’m lucky to still have a job.

One of the reports is my description of an ambulance crash. If I remember correctly, it is my most recent crash. I can't think of another, more recent one. Let’s pause a second and acknowledge that it’s pretty impressive, considering my last grinder was in 2003 or so, huh? I used to think occasional crashes were “just part of the job.” I was involved in a crash per year or thereabouts. I mean, when a medic drives x-thousand of miles per year, sometimes the dice come up with an unlucky number. Impossible to avoid, right? Nowadays I think occasional crashes may have been related to me driving like an asshat. But then I came across the report for this crash. It doesn’t seem to have been especially avoidable, so I don't know what to think. Maybe I have been lucky for the last decade.

Way, way, way back in the day, I was stoked to be working with one of my favorite partners. This was in 2003 or so. Early in the shift, we were assigned to a report of chest pain. I was driving and I flipped on the lights and siren. We were rolling on a huge four-lane road (four lanes northbound and four lanes southbound). I approached an intersection where I wanted to turn left. The light was red and there were cars in the number 1, 2, and 4 lanes. The three lane was open. I came up to the intersection, stopped (mostly), ensured the intersection was clear, and made my left turn through the red light from the three lane.

Crunch.

Yep. Ambulance crash. But it is not what you think. What happened was that the guy in the number one lane waited until I was in front of him before running the red to crash into the side of my bus. He up and plum rammed me. For no reason. Nobody has any idea why he did it. Including him – he said so to the police officer and to my supervisor. I have to admit – he was cool about it. It is nice when the other dude says the crash was his fault, in those words. He took all the blame. I mean, it was his fault and all, but a ton of other drivers would try to make excuses or stretch the truth. So good on him.

The worst part of the crash wasn’t the crash itself. I wasn’t at fault, the damage was minor, and nobody was hurt. The worst part is that they put my partner on another car while I was getting the crash investigated. When all of the investigation and paperwork got done and I swapped out ambulances into an uncrashed bus, I got a new partner! No! Crap! My dream of a cool shift with the partner I liked was dead! The partner I wanted to work with was across the city in another unit. Sadness…

At least crashing meant I could attend the rest of the shift. 

So it is possible that some accidents are unavoidable. It could be that all of my crashes are secretly, quietly unavoidable. Even the one where I hit a curb going about 40mph in the snow and got all the wheels to point in different directions. Even the one where I backed into a fence – completely unavoidable, right? After pondering it, I think many “unavoidable” crashes are due to poor choices and aggressive driving. There are certainly some ambulance accidents like the one described above that are accidental, but there are others resulting from a string of suboptimal choices with a crash at the end. 

I don’t know. I need to think about this some more.