San Luis Obispo County, CA, Crews Discuss Freeing Man Trapped in Mulcher
The Tribune (San Luis Obispo, Calif.)
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San Luis Obispo County firefighters and first responders pulled off a heroic show of expertise and teamwork in Nipomo this summer: They saved the life of a man who was caught inside an industrial mulching machine.
On Aug. 29, Cal Fire firefighters Chad Fleming, Ryan Gobler, Erin Riffle, Andrew Gertz, Jonathan Bartlett, Zachary Doerner and Five Cities Fire Authority Capt. Mark Searby responded to an on-the-job accident call of a man who had been trapped inside a mulcher, according to a video produced by the county.
The video was shown at the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday and shared with The Tribune.
The rescue site was near the intersection of Highway 1 and Oso Flaco Lake Road, according to a Facebook post from the time.
“It had the appearance of potentially two things: an extremely dynamic rescue and recovery, or a gruesome body discovery,” Fleming said in the video.
The mulching machine had rotating arms with huge spikes on them and a spiral-shaped auger shaft, Gobler described.
“I thought (it was) going to be a body recovery. I’ll be honest with you,” Gobler said. “It didn’t sound good.”
Over a four-hour rescue mission, the team achieved what they initially thought might not be possible: They pulled the man from the machine alive. How did first responders rescue man from mulcher?
Gobler and Doerner were the first to arrive, and what they saw shocked them.
“Here’s this gentleman who was crushed up to his waist, looking at me, asking for help,” Gobler said.
Gobler was told the man had gotten into the machine when it was off to clean out some debris when his co-worker, who didn’t know the man was inside, turned the mulcher back on. The man was pulled into the mulcher and buried under the debris.
“We could just see the top of his thighs, and that was about the best look we could get,” Riffle said.
Gobler said it was hard to figure out how to access the inside of the machine without causing more trauma or damage to the patient.
“How do I save this person?” Gobler recalled asking himself. “How do I keep him alive? ... He started to scream, ‘Hey, get me out of here, get me out of here,’ and you can see the look of terror his eyes.”
It quickly became clear that extricating the patient from the machine was going to be a battle in of itself.
The arms of the machine that had crushed the man up to his waist posed a grave threat. Removing the arms was going to release toxins into the man’s system that can kill “fairly quickly,” the firefighter said.
“How are we going to cut all this stuff out to get him out, and once we get him out, how do we keep him alive?” he said.
Luckily, Riffle had recently attended a training on machinery rescues.
“It really made things easy,” Fleming said. “I made him our rescue group supervisor, and he was able to coordinate all of the intricacies of the extrication ... and the cutting and the torch work.”
Fleming requested a trauma surgeon for a potential field amputation, which he’d never done is his 36-year career.
“I never thought that that would be a part of my repertoire, but that’s what we potentially were going to need,” he said.
Responders had to juggle a confluence of factors including blood loss, panic and difficulty in accessing the patient. Duties were divided among rescue, rigging and medical teams.
“He started kind of bucking around, screaming, acting (out),” Gobler said. “We had those IVs established, large-bore IVs. I didn’t want him to rip those out.”
Without access to an emergency helicopter that day, they had to fly nurses and paramedics into the Paso Robles Municipal Airport with emergency blood products and drive to Nipomo.
Eventually, Gertz very carefully entered the machine without putting any weight on the auger to remove mulch and debris so the responders could see and put tourniquets on the man, Gobler said. Extricating man from machine took three hours itself
At first, due to the patient’s injuries, the team planned to transport the man to the hospital in an aircraft with the auger, but the weight of the machine caused complications.
The responders realized they would have to cut the man free from the pieces of metal embedded into his body. But that presented its own challenges.
Cutting the metal created sparks and heat that threatened to burn the man and the surrounding mulch. Stopping constantly to water down the hot metal to prevent embers from catching, the extrication itself took over three hours, Gobler said.
For most of the rescue, Fleming stood beside with the man who pushed the button to start the machine. He was crying.
“When I had time, I was right there with him, just kind of going just, ‘He’s alive,’“ Fleming said. “There’s about 40 of the employees who are outside of our circle, kind of. This is their family member, this is their coworker, this is their friend. So, you know, everybody’s experiencing this.”
Once the auger was finally dissembled into pieces, the rescue team had to attach the man to a rigging system to lift him out by rope, Gobler said.
They successfully extricated the man from inside the machine and got him onto a gurney, but at that point his heart rate and blood pressure began to drop, Gobler said.
The patient was handed off to two flight nurses and two flight medics ready to provide a higher level of medical care.
“When they got him in the back of the ambulance, I kind of, I took a deep breath,” Gobler said. “In my mind, I was like, ‘Please be alive.’”
Sure enough, the patient’s vital signs stabilized.
“It was pretty, pretty special to see it all happen and to see that kind of multidiscipline, multi-agency, regionalized response,” Fleming said. “We’re pulling this guy out of a mulcher alive after four hours.”
Weeks later, the patient walked out of the hospital, alive and well.
“That’s why we’re here,” Fleming said. “We are here as public servants to help people. ... That day, that is serving with the ultimate outcome.”
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