We had been dispatched to a medical emergency when we saw our rescue truck. Once we’d finished with the medical call, we asked to be added to the call to see if we could help.
When we got there, we found a 40 US ton rough terrain, toppled over in a large workshop. It had been lifting a load, the mast for a large forklift, onto a trailer, when it tipped over onto the trailer. The operator, Kevin Easton, was trapped between the cab of the crane and the side of the trailer.
The crews there already had cribbed the boom of the crane up. They showed us where the victim was, but you couldn’t see him easily: just a bit of his shirt. I talked to him, and he was conscious, but his legs were pinned between the seat of the crane, the control pedestal and the foot controls.
Our access was very limited. You could crawl in there between the cab and trailer, and the paramedics and air ambulance crew were inside when we arrived, treating him. I crawled in under the cab to help him.
His main concern was that he was having trouble with his feet: he couldn’t feel them. The foot pedals were pressed against his ankles, so we wanted to relieve the pressure here first. We were able to cut two of the controls with a hydraulic cutter, but one was too thick to cut.
Instead, we used a reciprocating saw. There was not enough room for me to hold it with both hands and operate it, so I got it in position, and worked with a colleague to operate it. While he held it in place from above, I activated it until the last pedal had been cut off.
Once we got the foot controls cut away, it relieved a lot of the pressure on his legs. We then had to get him out of the cab. As the crane boom was laying across the trailer, we didn’t want to push the crane and the trailer apart, because it may have caused a shift to the center of gravity, and caused some unanticipated movement in the cab where his legs were trapped. If he’d been in a critical condition, we might have had to take more risks, but in this case, it was safer to take our time, make small movements, and ease him out.
Fort Worth FD Rescue 14’s crew was working simultaneously to open up the back of the cab. We worked on cutting away the controls to free him. We used a Holmatro hydraulic rescue tool (a ‘Jaws of Life’). This produces 30,000lb of pressure, and can be used to cut, spread, as a ram, or to pull. The first thing we did was to use the Jaws of Life to push the seat back a couple of inches.
Inside the cab, there was a handle that you use to pull yourself up into the cab. We attached a chain to the handle and Steve Urban of Rescue 14’s crew attached the other end of the chain to a substantial anchor point in the workshop. Then, a chain attachment was installed on the hydraulic spreaders, which were hooked into the chain. We slowly closed the hydraulic spreader to open the cab structure up a couple of inches.
We put another chain around the control console, with two of us working from above and below, and used the hydraulic spreaders again to pull this back. By the time we’d got the console pulled out, Rescue 14 had cut a hole through the back of the cab, allowing them access to the patient.
They could then pull him out from there. The gap we’d made was still very close, so as they slowly pulled him from above, I worked from beneath the cab to feed his feet out, one at a time. There was so little space, his boots wouldn’t pass through, so I had to ease these off a little at a time as they pulled his legs out.
Once he was out, he was taken to hospital with a fracture in his tibia and fibula, on his left leg.
