Bad physical accidents
Mar. 18th, 2005 09:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zdashamberThe worst I ever saw someone get hurt physically was a couple years back on the 4th of July weekend, when I was still doing hang gliding. (Yeah, I honest-to-god did hang gliding.) It came to mind this evening when I was watching the world pairs figure skating thing with Silent E, and there was a clip of one of the pairs 5 months ago where the guy lifted up the girl and then from the top of that lift, about 8' up, she just fell forward face flat on the ice, and kind of skidded a bit, and didn't move. The kind of thing that wrests an immediate "Oh dear god!" from you, where you know that someone's gotten badly hurt.
The girl's not only ok now, she just won the World Championship; and Barry, the hang glider pilot I'm going to talk about, is also ok now, and back to flying. If you want to know what it's like, as best as I can write, when someone gets really badly hurt, read on...
The Berkeley Hang Gliding Club (motto "Have fun, get high"), a decades-old co-op where they jointly own gliders and teach for free, was on a trip for the long summer weekend to Hat Creek, up at the north end of the California central valley. The only things there are a radio observatory and a teeeny tiny town... And one of the best hang gliding sites in the west. It's a "glass-off" site; one of those places where for reasons not understood, in the evening the entire valley starts going up, and you can boat around in the air wherever you like without sinking out.
See, in a hang glider, you're always being pulled down by gravity; that's where you get the speed of air going past your wing that lets you fly at all. To keep flying, you need to be in air that's going up faster than you're going down. Usually you find this air either along a ridge where the wind hits the land and is forced to go up, or in thermals; and finding the air going up and staying in it is extremely tricky. But during glass-off, a complete idiot could stay up—every piece of air is going up. (I demonstrated this to my own satisfaction the next day.)
It's not just the glass-off that makes Hat Creek a great site. It's also got a smooth, beautiful, unobstructed graded gravel launch off a cliff into ridge lift, and an enormous flat grassy field to land in. That's where we join our story:
The LZ (landing zone) has a windsock, but it's not the usual orange cone that stands out fully at 15 mph. It's a unique white smaller sock that stands out fully at something like 7-10 mph. In the trees to the west, the hang gliding club has set up camp, with lawn chairs and drinks and food, and a good many of us (groupies, pilots who didn't fly, pilots who have already landed) are walking around or sitting in lawn chairs with drinks MST3King people's landings. There are a good many people landing now, because the shadows of the 70' pine trees are stretching across the LZ, and it's not a good idea to land in the dark. Also, dinner will be happening.
Barry's making his approach. He's not coming out of the part of the sky that most the gliders are; he's closer to the campsite, and flying north, when most people are flying south. It doesn't actually matter what direction you're landing tonight; there are barely breaths of wind down here.
Barry was one of my instructors; always really enthusiastic, knows the weather, willing to take people down to Milpitas where the training hill is every weekend. He's broken both of his arms hang gliding, maybe several times, and I once watched him take off with a storm blowing in, the wind about 30 mph and so cross that as he flew down the glider was pointed 40 degrees away from the direction he was flying. He's one of the very experienced guys in the club, but the other experienced folks say that he takes some bad risks.
He made a stupid move. About 30 feet off the ground, he started a turn from north to south. There's no way in hell you should be turning below 100 (maaaybe 80) feet: you should be focused solely on building up speed for landing. And this is why: as you turn, you sink faster. His left wingtip touched the ground. He was no longer on a wing: he'd been going about 30 mph and now he'd become a lever about 22 feet long, and it swung down and smashed him into the dirt.
The glider kind of bounced once with the impact. We all knew, knew right there, that we might have just watched Barry die. Other people left their lawn chairs and ran to the crash. I'd been walking to some table, and I'd turned to catch the swinging smash. I ran for the first aid kit... The kit we'd always taken to practice, a big orange pillow-shaped duffel sort of thing. When we'd been at the hangar yesterday packing up tables and stuff to join the main group already at Hat Creek, I'd tossed it into the van just in case. I grabbed the kit and ran out to the crash site, glancing to my left to make sure I wasn't going to be interfering with anyone else's landing. Barry's glider hadn't moved.
When I got there he was kind of groaning or howling. NOOouOuoH! NOOOououHH! And he was kind of flopping around a bit, on his belly, but tangled up in the wires and aluminum of the steering frame of the hang glider. The glider was like a tent above him. There were about 5-6 people around, mostly kind of bent over him, bit of panic in the voices, but reasonably collected, "Barry, can you hear me? Barry, don't move!!" NOOOohHH! There was a little bit of blood. Barry was basically out of his head with pain. RRRRrrAUH...! Geedid OFF! He trashed around. "Barry, don't move!!" "Let's try to get the glider off of him..."
He'd somehow got unhooked, and a bunch of us lifted the glider off and away, a couple down near him to try to be sure it didn't touch him as it moved. He flopped over onto his back "Barry don't move!" Gedid OFF! Can't BREATHE! Somehow his helmet got off, too. "Barry, you're going to be ok. Listen to me, Barry. Barry, don't move. Look me in the eyes, Barry, Barry, look at me. You're going to be ok. Look me in the eyes."
This was all mostly Ann, all the talking I remember. Experienced pilot, really had her head screwed on straight. She was now kneeling over Barry, who, on his back and free of the glider, stopped thrashing and howling. She was trying to check his eyes to see about concussion, and keep him awake to avoid coma. His upper left arm was bloody in a patch, and the bridge of his nose and his upper lip and his chin. There was in fact a visible bloody hole in his arm, sort of gobbet-y, though it was getting dark. I opened up the first aid kit for the first time ever and found nothing helpful, and used it as a pillow for Barry's head on the rocky ground. We didn't want him to move anywhere less slanted and rock-filled, since who knows about his spine...
There were a lot of people around now, and I figured Barry might be "coming to" sort of. There were a lot of people saying things like "Don't crowd him! Barry, can you hear me? Let him have some space!" I think I was trying to get people to give him some space. Then I figured I wasn't being helpful and the least I could do was follow my own direction. I collected Barry's helmet; it was black, with night falling, and I walked back to the camp to head people off from joining the crowd by bringing a first-hand account to them. Didn't really work; anyone with the sense to settle for a 2nd-hand account was already back there waiting. I'd grabbed Barry's helmet by the front part; it was a full-face motocycle helmet, and good thing, too, or his face would probably have been shattered. Anyway, it was wet with his blood on the front part, and so I washed it off before it set... Kinda silly, since it's not like helmets can be used twice, but I suppose it was better than having the blood stink up the car of whoever carried it back to the Bay Area. Washed off my hands, too. There was someone fussing about how we should wear gloves, and a bunch of plastic gloves were among the useless things I found in the first aid kit...
The ambulance showed up pretty quick for the middle of nowhere; maybe 20 minutes after Barry crashed. The driver stopped at the camp, and I was among the people who pointed out the glider and knot of people out in the dark field, and I think I walked out there with a flashlight, though lots of other people were out there with flashlights by then, so I came back to not be vulture-y. They loaded Barry up and took him away, with a few pilots to watch him at the hospital and a chase car.
Then we had dinner.
We didn't hear what his actual injury was for a couple days; I think he had a compound fracture of his upper arm and actually lost a centimeter or two of bone near his elbow. (And then later something went wrong the bone graft, and so he was fucked up for a year or more...) And he didn't remember anything past the morning of that day.
I've thought about it since; mostly about the first aid kit. I was disappointed that it seemed to have so little useful stuff; but thinking about it, I can't think of anything really useful for compound fracture sorts of situations. I guess you can only really treat bleeding on the scene, and maybe shock if the ambulances are far far away.
What really sticks with me are the noises he made; scary to hear someone out of his head with pain. He wasn't listening to us; if his back had been injured, he would have hurt himself more with his moving. We didn't want to force him to stop, though, because that might have hurt him worse, too.
The girl's not only ok now, she just won the World Championship; and Barry, the hang glider pilot I'm going to talk about, is also ok now, and back to flying. If you want to know what it's like, as best as I can write, when someone gets really badly hurt, read on...
The Berkeley Hang Gliding Club (motto "Have fun, get high"), a decades-old co-op where they jointly own gliders and teach for free, was on a trip for the long summer weekend to Hat Creek, up at the north end of the California central valley. The only things there are a radio observatory and a teeeny tiny town... And one of the best hang gliding sites in the west. It's a "glass-off" site; one of those places where for reasons not understood, in the evening the entire valley starts going up, and you can boat around in the air wherever you like without sinking out.
See, in a hang glider, you're always being pulled down by gravity; that's where you get the speed of air going past your wing that lets you fly at all. To keep flying, you need to be in air that's going up faster than you're going down. Usually you find this air either along a ridge where the wind hits the land and is forced to go up, or in thermals; and finding the air going up and staying in it is extremely tricky. But during glass-off, a complete idiot could stay up—every piece of air is going up. (I demonstrated this to my own satisfaction the next day.)
It's not just the glass-off that makes Hat Creek a great site. It's also got a smooth, beautiful, unobstructed graded gravel launch off a cliff into ridge lift, and an enormous flat grassy field to land in. That's where we join our story:
The LZ (landing zone) has a windsock, but it's not the usual orange cone that stands out fully at 15 mph. It's a unique white smaller sock that stands out fully at something like 7-10 mph. In the trees to the west, the hang gliding club has set up camp, with lawn chairs and drinks and food, and a good many of us (groupies, pilots who didn't fly, pilots who have already landed) are walking around or sitting in lawn chairs with drinks MST3King people's landings. There are a good many people landing now, because the shadows of the 70' pine trees are stretching across the LZ, and it's not a good idea to land in the dark. Also, dinner will be happening.
Barry's making his approach. He's not coming out of the part of the sky that most the gliders are; he's closer to the campsite, and flying north, when most people are flying south. It doesn't actually matter what direction you're landing tonight; there are barely breaths of wind down here.
Barry was one of my instructors; always really enthusiastic, knows the weather, willing to take people down to Milpitas where the training hill is every weekend. He's broken both of his arms hang gliding, maybe several times, and I once watched him take off with a storm blowing in, the wind about 30 mph and so cross that as he flew down the glider was pointed 40 degrees away from the direction he was flying. He's one of the very experienced guys in the club, but the other experienced folks say that he takes some bad risks.
He made a stupid move. About 30 feet off the ground, he started a turn from north to south. There's no way in hell you should be turning below 100 (maaaybe 80) feet: you should be focused solely on building up speed for landing. And this is why: as you turn, you sink faster. His left wingtip touched the ground. He was no longer on a wing: he'd been going about 30 mph and now he'd become a lever about 22 feet long, and it swung down and smashed him into the dirt.
The glider kind of bounced once with the impact. We all knew, knew right there, that we might have just watched Barry die. Other people left their lawn chairs and ran to the crash. I'd been walking to some table, and I'd turned to catch the swinging smash. I ran for the first aid kit... The kit we'd always taken to practice, a big orange pillow-shaped duffel sort of thing. When we'd been at the hangar yesterday packing up tables and stuff to join the main group already at Hat Creek, I'd tossed it into the van just in case. I grabbed the kit and ran out to the crash site, glancing to my left to make sure I wasn't going to be interfering with anyone else's landing. Barry's glider hadn't moved.
When I got there he was kind of groaning or howling. NOOouOuoH! NOOOououHH! And he was kind of flopping around a bit, on his belly, but tangled up in the wires and aluminum of the steering frame of the hang glider. The glider was like a tent above him. There were about 5-6 people around, mostly kind of bent over him, bit of panic in the voices, but reasonably collected, "Barry, can you hear me? Barry, don't move!!" NOOOohHH! There was a little bit of blood. Barry was basically out of his head with pain. RRRRrrAUH...! Geedid OFF! He trashed around. "Barry, don't move!!" "Let's try to get the glider off of him..."
He'd somehow got unhooked, and a bunch of us lifted the glider off and away, a couple down near him to try to be sure it didn't touch him as it moved. He flopped over onto his back "Barry don't move!" Gedid OFF! Can't BREATHE! Somehow his helmet got off, too. "Barry, you're going to be ok. Listen to me, Barry. Barry, don't move. Look me in the eyes, Barry, Barry, look at me. You're going to be ok. Look me in the eyes."
This was all mostly Ann, all the talking I remember. Experienced pilot, really had her head screwed on straight. She was now kneeling over Barry, who, on his back and free of the glider, stopped thrashing and howling. She was trying to check his eyes to see about concussion, and keep him awake to avoid coma. His upper left arm was bloody in a patch, and the bridge of his nose and his upper lip and his chin. There was in fact a visible bloody hole in his arm, sort of gobbet-y, though it was getting dark. I opened up the first aid kit for the first time ever and found nothing helpful, and used it as a pillow for Barry's head on the rocky ground. We didn't want him to move anywhere less slanted and rock-filled, since who knows about his spine...
There were a lot of people around now, and I figured Barry might be "coming to" sort of. There were a lot of people saying things like "Don't crowd him! Barry, can you hear me? Let him have some space!" I think I was trying to get people to give him some space. Then I figured I wasn't being helpful and the least I could do was follow my own direction. I collected Barry's helmet; it was black, with night falling, and I walked back to the camp to head people off from joining the crowd by bringing a first-hand account to them. Didn't really work; anyone with the sense to settle for a 2nd-hand account was already back there waiting. I'd grabbed Barry's helmet by the front part; it was a full-face motocycle helmet, and good thing, too, or his face would probably have been shattered. Anyway, it was wet with his blood on the front part, and so I washed it off before it set... Kinda silly, since it's not like helmets can be used twice, but I suppose it was better than having the blood stink up the car of whoever carried it back to the Bay Area. Washed off my hands, too. There was someone fussing about how we should wear gloves, and a bunch of plastic gloves were among the useless things I found in the first aid kit...
The ambulance showed up pretty quick for the middle of nowhere; maybe 20 minutes after Barry crashed. The driver stopped at the camp, and I was among the people who pointed out the glider and knot of people out in the dark field, and I think I walked out there with a flashlight, though lots of other people were out there with flashlights by then, so I came back to not be vulture-y. They loaded Barry up and took him away, with a few pilots to watch him at the hospital and a chase car.
Then we had dinner.
We didn't hear what his actual injury was for a couple days; I think he had a compound fracture of his upper arm and actually lost a centimeter or two of bone near his elbow. (And then later something went wrong the bone graft, and so he was fucked up for a year or more...) And he didn't remember anything past the morning of that day.
I've thought about it since; mostly about the first aid kit. I was disappointed that it seemed to have so little useful stuff; but thinking about it, I can't think of anything really useful for compound fracture sorts of situations. I guess you can only really treat bleeding on the scene, and maybe shock if the ambulances are far far away.
What really sticks with me are the noises he made; scary to hear someone out of his head with pain. He wasn't listening to us; if his back had been injured, he would have hurt himself more with his moving. We didn't want to force him to stop, though, because that might have hurt him worse, too.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-19 04:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-19 06:36 pm (UTC)I think I thought about painkillers at the time, but since we expected ambulance rescue, we didn't want to be the cause of screwed-up drug interactions... I think I might prefer ketamine to morphine; isn't ketamine more of a a dissociative drug, so you're still aware, but don't care? Whereas morphine knocks you out? I dunno. Alas, both are illegal. Bah.