Anatomy of an Accident(As told by a member of the police accident response unit)
Accidents are never pleasant sights. There is always the shattered glass. And sometimes there is so much blood you think someone had used a spray-painting device to spatter the scene with blood. Then you see the body lying on the road surface twitching sometimes. There may be an arm or leg missing. It is difficult to believe that only a few minutes earlier this still figure was a walking, talking, breathing human being. Then you hear the groans and screams of the injured and the dying. Together with the ambulance people and staffers from other police services you do your best to provide comfort until they are taken to hospital. But it’s not only the victims we have to worry about. The drivers of the vehicles involved are often also traumatised. We sometimes hear these drivers say: "I can’t believe I have killed another human being". You may have read or heard the words "there was a smell of death in the air". You may not believe this, but we can actually "smell" death when there is a fatality in a collision. I have also heard others who do my kind of work say this. In some accidents one of the first things to catch our attention is shoes lying on the road. Usually when vehicles travelling at speed hit pedestrians, people are knocked out of their shoes by the force. The sight of shoes is generally a bad sign. It often tells us that the victim is either very seriously hurt or dead. The battle to save a life by the ambulance people at an accident is always one of a fight against time. Sometimes we see people who are virtually at death’s door saved, and at other times, we find people who seem okay and even talking, suddenly die as they are pulled from the wreckage after being stabilised. These days we even have to be on guard against criminal activity at accidents. There are people out there who don’t hesitate to steal even from the dead and the dying. So, the protection of victims’ possessions is now also one of our tasks. We hope that adults will not drag young children with them to see what’s going on at an accident. Children shouldn’t be exposed to gruesome sights. It can affect the children psychologically. There have been occasions when we have been criticised for joking while at accidents. We are not numb to the sufferings of others. The joking is sometimes a cover for what we really feel. I think we are more aware than most that the person lying on the road could well be one of us. The battle to prevent accidents never stops. Roadblocks, for instance, may irritate motorists, but they also give us a chance to pull unroadworhy vehicles off the road. Just one unroadworthy vehicle can cause so much harm and pain.
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NO one wants to be a motor accident victim, yet few realise that the
dangers of becoming one are always there as long as you are in a traffic
environment. I often wonder whether the onlookers who crowd accident scenes
ever think for a moment that they could well have been one of the victims.
Or do they come just for the "excitement" and forget about what
they saw soon after they leave the scene. Of course, we always hope that
there was a lesson learnt and that people will make every effort to try to
be safe in traffic.
