County highway relatively safe over Memorial Day weekend
St. Regis and West End Volunteer firefighters work to stabilize two victims in a rollover accident on Interstate 90 last Sunday. Photo by Bruce Charles
West End, St. Regis firefighters help in rollover
Ambulance, fire and rescue workers were thankful for a relatively slow Memorial Day weekend with only one crash and no serious injuries in Mineral County.
“Most holiday situations like this we usually end up with a couple of wrecks, sometimes more,” West End Fire Chief Bruce Charles said.
Charles said five West End firefighters and three St. Regis firefighters responded to a vehicle rollover on Interstate 90 Sunday, May 25 around 4 p.m. A white, 1998 Chevrolet Blazer had rolled over at mile marker 18 near DeBorgia. Charles said one of the occupants was initially trapped in the vehicle, but by the time emergency personnel had arrived he had freed himself.
When they arrived on the scene, rescue workers placed the occupants Ross Eells and Kathrine Frost on backboards and Superior Ambulance Services transported them to the Mineral Community Hosiptal, where they were checked out and released.
Charles said that in an accident as violent as a rollover it is standard procedure to put victims on backboards and transport them to the hospital.
“The people were pretty shaken up and it’s a precautionary thing because you don’t have an X-ray machine in the field,” Charles said.
Charles said things went pretty smoothly. He added that eight responders is the perfect number to have at an incident because it leaves four people at the actual scene and four more to direct traffic and keep the rescue workers safe.
“We were happy that they weren’t injured any more than they were,” Charles said.
On holiday weekends Charles said there tend to be more accidents and since the fire departments in Mineral County are all volunteers, there is no guarantee how many people will respond at an incident.
“Our people are always on call. The risk we have is that if all our people go on vacation we’re in trouble,” Charles said.
He added that they usually have as many as 12 people respond from the West End Fire Department at an accident, but since it was Memorial Day weekend, there were fewer and the St. Regis Firefighters who responded made things go smoothly.
Charles said that driving on long weekends can be particularly dangerous.
“What happens is you get people who are traveling long distances, probably not getting as much sleep as they normally would, trying to get home to go to work the next day. Get-home-itis gets people in trouble,” Charles said.
He said that on those weekends they see more accidents than normal out on the roads. This Memorial Day Weekend they did not have to respond to any other accidents.
“It’s a good time to be even more cautious than you normally are,” Charles said.