Ted Walker

Sub Officer Ted Walker: 26 Years Service With the Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service.

When someone finds out what I do for a living one of the most common responses is for them to comment, “oh I couldn’t do your job”. Then I know what’s coming next! “How do you deal with what see at road traffic accidents it must be awful!”

In fact I find it one of the most rewarding aspects of my job. As a large fire develops you quickly find yourself becoming a small cog in a large wheel but at a road traffic accident nearly every person around that vehicle plays a vital and pivotal role. What I see is not the horror of traumatic injury but the mechanics of entrapment. To focus on anything else would not allow me to accomplish my role of freeing those persons and giving them their optimum chance in their fight for life! That is the challenge and the satisfaction of rising to it is immense.

The hardest part of being a Fire Brigade Incident Commander at a crash scene is to stand back and not get sucked into the incident where you quickly lose the bigger picture and ultimately control of the incident but your want is, always to be on the end of the rescue equipment doing it all yourself.

The first road traffic accident I attended as a young Firefighter at the start of my career involved a car impacting with a motorway bridge stanchion, which at the time of our arrival was engulfed in flame. On extinguishing the vehicle I was given the task hack sawing  (Modern hydraulic cutting equipment not being in use then.) through the centre doorpost directly above the casualty who was by then a skeleton encased in a blackened husk. As I cut, his skull shook with the vibration of the saw. Next I had to cut the seat springs that had fused to his body, with bolt croppers. I reasoned that I could do him no further harm and that if I could cope with this I could cope with anything.

On some occasions it has not always been possible to stay detached. One foggy January afternoon we were called to four-year-old boy who had been run over by a skip lorry on his way home from school. We arrived at the same time as the Paramedics. He laid under the vehicle dressed in a navy duffle coat his face grey with the pallor of death. This was his first and last week at school. He was not trapped there was nothing to focus on save his young 22 year old mother sobbing beside the road having just witnessed her own son’s death. I pulled her away from the scene of the paramedics trying in vain to resuscitate the small body. I sat holding her in the back of the fire appliance. In between sobs she asked me to pick up his lunch box, as he would need it the next day. I fetched it and handed it to her, she clutched it and continued to sob. I held her for more than 30 minutes before a second ambulance could take her to follow her son on his final journey. When she left I could cry myself. If every incident was like that one that one I would not still be doing this job. You can only hold so many images like that in your head. Detachment is my protection and necessity.