One of our Portland Police buddies, a former Buck Ambulance EMT, had just left. The cops liked to hang out in our quarters on the corner of NW Broadway and Glisan. Buck ambulances had been responding out of that building since back in the day of horse drawn ambulances. On the way to the scene we were notified that our cop buddy was on scene and the multiple patients were critical. We asked for additional ambulances.
Nothing could have prepared this 21 year old rookie for what I was about to see. Upon arrival we found a large American car with its top wrapped around a huge Douglas fir tree. We could
only see the undercarriage and wheels. The whole car was bent about 30 degrees and the roof was crushed onto the top of the seats.There was no access to any of the people in the car. We didn't know how many there were or their condition. Stumbling around in the underbrush, 40 feet over a steep embankment, in the dark, left everything quite confusing. Through a small opening in the rear window I found some one's back and there was a hand protruding through the right passenger window between the ground and the tree. There was no pulse.
A Portland firefighter and I crawled on top of the car, which was now the driver side door. We pried it open with a halagon tool to reveal the 18 year old male driver. He is the first, of many, I pronounced "dead" in the course of my EMS career.
There wasn't much we could do until additional heavy equipment and personnel arrived. Someone started an IV on the protruding hand, we set up a rudimentary incident command, and established limited communication with someone inside the car.
Soon a heavy wrecker arrived and we carefully pulled the car off of the tree and lowered it onto its belly. The Jaws were fired up and the roof removed. It was a grisly scene under that smashed roof. We found two 18 year olds in the front seat: a boy and his date. They were both dead. The front seat was completely crushed, as were their occupants. The backseat passengers were pinned by the front seat and the deceased in the front seat were pinned by the dash.
Both backseat passengers were conscious, but seriously injured. Unfortunately we could not remove them until we removed the two front seat victims; which was going to take some time.
The back seat passengers were not wearing seat belts. When the car left the road, turned on its side, and hit the tree - top first, they were thrown up into the rear window. The 17 year old girl is the one whose back I discovered on the initial assessment of the scene. As the roof was removed, she became my patient. Without the roof to support her, her upper torso was left projecting out of the car. Her hip/pelvis were fractured and she most likely had spinal injuries. I used my upper body to support her during the 45 minutes it took to extricate her. But my support was more than physical and medical, I also poured my heart into supporting her emotionally.
The 17 year old girl I held in my arms that night was the younger sister of the dead girl in the front seat. The 17 year old boy next to her was the younger brother of the dead boy in the driver's seat. Both of these kids, who were the age of my younger brother at the time, had to watch as their older siblings were unceremoniously extricated from their entrapment in the front seat of this crushed car. Time was of the essence for our living patients, but we had to remove the crushed bodies before we could remove, treat, and transport their once beloved family members in the back seat.
It seemed to take forever, but once this little girl in my arms was free, we put her on a backboard and carried her up the hill to a waiting ambulance. It wasn't until we had left OHSU and were back in our quarters that I began to fully understand the very public hell we had just experienced. 30 or so responders; police, firefighters, EMTs, and paramedics and just pulled these two kids from the grip of a death machine.
The images of that scene will never leave my head. Even now I wonder how it affected my colleagues at the scene. Is this what we signed on to do? No one told us it would be this hard, and this ugly.
I can only imagine what a fun day that foursome had enjoyed. Good kids out enjoying a warm Summer day in Portland. Then his attention wandered, or most likely he was going too fast and the car began to skid. The car left the road going way too fast. Laughter turned to screams and before they had time to even catch their breath the car came to a grotesque stop. Two were dead and two didn't even know what day it was, let alone where they were, or what happened.
Who knows how long that car sat there before someone discovered it over the embankment? Who knows how long those kids in the back seat cried and prayed for help to arrive? Who knows where they are today, 27 years later?
It can never again be the "same as it ever was."
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