Make sure somebody's calling 911. Do it myself if I don't get
somebody doing it in the first minute.
Make sure somebody's flagging traffic. Preferably four somebodies,
as no direction should be left unflagged in this situation.
Get a look at everybody and figure out who to work on first.
Um, shock. Deal with it. And the c-spine thing, which the
skateboarder quiz reminded me of.
Gonna need more people to help with this one. Draft 'em as they
come in.
...OK, gonna read responses in a minute. First, though, a
reminiscence: I did have a real-life "make the scene safe" task
once, and thank God I had the right reflexes to do it, though I
lucked out that there was no first aid required, because I wasn't
thinking that way at all in the crunch. Here's what happened: I was
returning from a rehearsal with my singing partner Jane, on a snowy
winter's night in Minneapolis. I lived on a busy main drag about
midway up a steep hill (46th and Xerxes, for those of you who know
the town), and the street was, as usual, full of parked cars on
both sides, but it's a nice wide street. It was wide enough that
when the newly-minted teenaged driver going up the hill started to
swerve and then gunned it and corrected wrong, she did a solid 180,
missing the parked cars on the uphill side (in her lane) and making
solid full broadside impact on the parked car in the downhill lane,
totalling it.
We pulled over and parked. This was before cellphones so I ran into
the house, told someone there to call 911 and tell them there was a
car accident out front, and ran up to the top of the hill to flag
traffic, since it's steep enough it was almost blind. I yelled to
Jane to get flares as I passed her. She brought me some, and I set
up two at the top of the hill and kept flagging, while she set up
one at the bottom. The driver of the car turned out to be OK, from
what we could tell from the actions of the paramedics and police.
She was last seen being reunited with a parent who, at the moment,
seemed mostly in the "Oh thank God, you are alive!" phase, though
with flickers of "O my God, the car!" starting to show.
No other cars got involved in the accident, and I know we helped
make that so. It was good to be useful, because it sure could have
been much worse.
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