Feb. 14--An ordinary morning reporting to work at Savannah River Site quickly turned into a lifesaving moment for four good Samaritans last year.
Before sunrise on Christmas Eve, a truck driver lost control of his vehicle and hit a concrete barrier on a bridge inside the SRS boundaries.
The driver, whose name was not released, was ejected and pinned beneath the truck door, according to a U.S. Department of Energy news release.
Three SRS employees arrived and found the truck teetering on the edge of the bridge. The driver was leaning backward over the barrier with his legs under the door and his upper body hanging off the bridge, said Billy Robinson, an SRS firefighter.
Robinson, the first emergency responder on the scene, stopped on his way to the fire station before his shift started. The three other employees were holding the man up, waiting for help to arrive.
"They were taking turns holding him up. You could tell they were exhausted," Robinson said. "I jumped in and did the same thing."
Finding the man with life-threatening injuries, Robinson called dispatchers and requested heavy equipment to extricate the driver and a medical helicopter to get him to the hospital. The victim was airlifted to Georgia Regents Medical Center.
Robinson, Jerry Johnson and Rex Brown were honored for their lifesaving actions by David Moody, the DOE's site manager. The fourth good Samaritan chose to remain anonymous, Robinson said.
The truck driver lived only because the first three men stopped at the crash scene instead of passing by, he said.
"These people chose to go out of their way," Robinson said. "Beyond a shadow of a doubt, if they hadn't done what they did, the man would have died."
Copyright 2014 - The Augusta Chronicle, Ga.
