The first responders who 'never leave them at the side of a road alone’

“Normally when we arrive at incidents, there may be someone there or maybe the guards might be here, or an ambulance might be there, or some passersby.

“In this particular incident, we arrived and there was no one at all. There was just the car. It had crashed into a pillar, and there was nobody around, which is unusual.

“There was no noise, no sound, just the car. There was no no screaming, no crying, no shouting, no roaring."

Just absolute silence.

“It was pitch black, and you could barely make out the car on the side of the road with your torch.

“As I approached the car, I could hear the glass crunching under my boots. My feet also hit bits of the car as I walked towards it.

“My torch picked up the outline of the car battery on the road, and I could see tail lights, and headlights strewn across the road in front of me the closer I got.

“Then I saw him.” 

As he got to the door, he could see the driver through the shattered side window. He was leant over to his left side, and there was a small trickle of blood from the top of his head. There were no other obvious signs of injuries.

Kevin knew he wasn’t breathing because while in the stretch of light from his torch he could make out the misty white clouds of his own breath as he breathed in the cold darkness. He couldn't see any from the driver’s mouth.

His eyes were closed and he looked like he was asleep. 

"He could have woken at any moment, and then opened the door and walked out by himself. There was shattered glass from his side window in his lap.” 

Holding his torch with his left hand, he leaned into the car to check for a pulse in the driver’s neck. This meant placing his index and third fingers to the side of his windpipe. Nothing. He was gone.

Road crash scene

Kevin is not one to sugar coat the reality of what he and his Cork City Fire Brigade colleagues are confronted with in vehicle collisions.

In one, he explains, there are three phases.

“Firstly, the car hits an object, be it a wall or another car,” he explains.

“Then, in the second phase, the person moves forward in their seat, and they hit an airbag in the car, or — if they don’t have their seat belt on — the steering wheel.

“Then, the third phase is where the person’s internal organs move forward on impact. It could be their heart hitting the wall of their chest, or it could be their lungs, or it could be their brain moving forward and hitting the front of their skull.” 

There are, he says, two tell tale signs that a driver has not been using their seat belt.

“Usually you get this spider’s web effect on the front windscreen,” he says.

“It’s where their head hit. Another way is one we see as we arrive at the vehicle and look inside and we see the steering wheel is bent.” 

There was one harrowing incident that still sticks with Kevin. With his colleagues, they were trying to take someone who had died of the car when their phone started to ring.

“I remember one case there a while ago, we couldn’t get the person out of the car so we had to cut them out, and the phone rang. The phone rang for a while, then it would stop and then it would start again.

“I think in this case, the phone must have rung around three or four times. But the lads were just concentrating on the job at hand, and operating the cutting gear.

“We couldn’t get to the phone, because it was in the footwell of the person’s car. It rang out as we worked. But as we got nearer to being able to take the person out, one of the lads clocked the name on the screen of the phone.

“It was ‘Mum’, and she was probably wondering why they were late home. Little would she have known that while she was calling the number, we were in the middle of cutting their loved one out of the car.” 

His matter-of-fact manner about the process leading up to his arrival at the scene of a car crash belies the constant training he and his colleague undergo.

Indeed, the second their alarms go off in the station, how they act has been practiced so often over years that it is now second nature.

As well as being a sub officer, Kevin is also a first responder, who uses the fire engine’s medical bag at collision and other scenes they get called to.

Along with a defibrillator, it has an assortment of things he uses to try and save lives, including so-called ‘advanced airways’ — the tubes he puts down people’s throats to help them breathe.

They're colour-coded, depending on a person’s estimated weight.

From the moment a call comes through, the crew has a minute to get on board their fire engine and be out on the road.

“We get a printout of the call, which will tell us the details about the call. As we drive out of the station, I’ll be trying to contact the control to see if they've any further details.

“They might have the number of casualties involved, the number of vehicles involved and they'll usually confirm if the ambulance service is mobile to the incident, and that the guards are also mobile to it.” 

As the engines race to clear inner city traffic, Kevin says he is also trying to come up with a plan of what he and his crew are going to do when they arrive.

“One of our main concerns for us is the protection of our own crews and the rest of the emergency responders at the scene,” he explains.

“So we would initially use what we call a ‘fend off’ approach, which will see us when we arrive and typically park the truck at an angle against oncoming traffic so we have a safe area to work with.” 

'Treat people the way we treat our own'

For someone who sees people at the most vulnerable they have been since their birth, being at the side of a person who has just died must be the catalyst for the sort of philosophical conversations or thoughts few of us get to have.

“I don't know how to articulate it,” he said. "I suppose we have a great tradition in the fire brigade of where we'd always treat people the way we treat our own.

“So we'll always treat people the way as if they were a member of our own family. If someone is dead, unfortunately, there's nothing we can do.

“They always get huge respect, we give them dignity, we will shield them from the public's view as best we can and we'll handle them as we would our own family. 

“We never leave them alone either at the side of a road. We'd always stay with the person until basically the hearse arrives to remove them from the scene.”