![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
"If you make an accident after midnight and don't find a drunk, keep looking - you've missed somebody." -- Riley's Rules of EMS
Not the movie. That was fiction. This was real. I have a number of friends and relatives who work or have worked in medical/hospital sorts of fields. I've heard stories - too many. And had one experience where I was up close, though not really all that close. I was close enough or too close as it was. There is damned good reason I wear a seatbelt, automatically - and it's not because of the state laws or federal pressures about them. There is also (the same?) reason that if I expect to be driving, I do not drink and if I do drink, I do not drive. This happened some years ago, but I've just fairly recently had a reason to post this story.
As some may know, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
jmaynard used to be a volunteer paramedic in League City, TX. He did that for 17 years (and unbuckled three people. Two just too scared to move. One just barely alive, but alive! Wear your seatbelt, damnit.)
One night, I rode along. Most of the night was dull - and that's good. Boredom is the ideal. The best wish you can give to a person in any sort of emergency response position is to wish them an uneventful shift. There were two calls. One was a truly minor thing, a mere 'fender-bender' if even that. An older gentleman was taken by ambulance to a hospital just to be absolutely sure nothing was really wrong. The other call, was sadly more memorable.
If you've ever been in League City, TX (near Houston) you likely know that the idea of going through it, even with lights and siren going, at 70 to 90 mph means things are well-nigh desolate - thus early AM. We arrived to find no patient. What we saw was an overturned, flaming pick-up truck - with no driver. And some ways away, after some curious tracks in the turf, a car with a driver who wouldn't come out or roll the window down. That was a police problem, not ours.
Where's the patient? "People don't look up" isn't just a line from Second Life (scavenger type) hunts. Reality is like that too. We spent time looking up in trees, down in ditches, etc. Only to come to a very unfortunate conclusion: the pickup driver was probably under the truck. Eventually the fire crew had the fire out and the truck was turned over. And I was given instruction to stay back, for which I am grateful. Yes, that's where he was.
The truck driver's one mistake was not wearing a seatbelt. I don't know that it would have saved him here, but I know that without it he didn't even have a chance. What happened? The car driver was not sober. The guy in the truck was simply on his way to work. The car nosed under the bed of the pickup. They both went off the road. Somehow the truck wound up flipping end-over-end (was the assumption). Somewhere in that, the windshield popped out. And the unbelted driver popped out. And the truck landed on him. When did the fire start? Who knows? But result is one dead pickup driver, no matter the order of things. Somehow the car had made it back to the road. And that's all I really know of the events of that night, as that's all I saw or heard about.
The car driver? No idea what happened to that person, but I suspect an up-close experience with the legal system.
First off, to get it out of the way: There was not a fire.
My usual routine involves me waking up, getting to the kitchen, and making a mug of coffee. Tonight it didn't happen that way. I woke up, all right, and made it to the kitchen, but noticed the Keurig was off. No lights. Microwave was unpowered, as was the Foreman grill (new one has LEDs that are always on). Geeze, another power outage? Nope, the fridge and the oven clock were on. Did a breaker pop? A breaker re-set later... and nothing changed. Digging out the book that shows what outlets are on what breaker, I found that I'd flipped the wrong breaker. Go flip the right one. Still nothing. What the? Investigation is called for, but first a Coke since coffee isn't happening any time soon.
The breaker is suspected and a trip to the hardware store only reveals that the place is closed for the day (and the Sunday hours are even more limited) so it's decided to swap a less-used breaker into place. That gets done... and still nothing has changed. Voltage reading shows the hot side is indeed hot. But the sockets are not.
Wait, most sockets lack voltage. One is powered. Double check that it is on the previously suspected breaker. It is. Breaker set to OFF. Outlet pulled... and crap, it's charred. At least it then failed open and stopped before things got much worse. Loosen & re-tighten a screw to get a decent connection. Switch the breaker on just long enough to see that another outlet has power again. Switch OFF, not trusting the charred outlet.
Alright, outlet needs replacing, but hardware store is closed. Don't we have a spare? Evidently not. But there are less-used outlets that can be swapped out. An outlet in the basement is pulled (and thanks to a UPS, there is no downtime even with the power off to the circuit for a few minutes.) With less cussing than expected, the charred outlet is replaced with the good one. A test shows that solved the problem and didn't create any ones, and then the outlet is put physically into place and covered.
And after all that, then it could be time to eat. And finally make the coffee.
Now, although no new breaker is needed after all, another outlet is. Only when that is acquired and put into place will this adventure truly be over.
After the AnthroCon and NYC trips the past couple weekends, it was nice to pretty much do nothing. The peaks of this weekend were seeing Ron Babb again (who was wondering we had had been), laughing a lot at a radio show with Bob Hope and Jack Benny together, spending some time at the local range, having pizza delivered, and missing any excitement that was supposed to happen on Downtown Plaza.
Saturday Downtown Plaza was blocked off for a ways so a local radio station could throw their promo party thing. Someone with luck and the ability to listen to them a lot supposedly won a Harley. But that wasn't the excitement. A block or so south of where I used to live there is the Rippe grain elevator. It's a fairly small thing as grain elevators go. Saturday night, someone said, there was a fire. And it just burned, there wasn't a dust explosion. I drove within sight of the place on my way back to work. Yep, there was a fire. The top of one structure is burned out. Glad I was elsewhere.
