In the wake of the nappy incident, I was feeling rather cynical when the news of the collapsed building in Victoria hit the control room.
“Building collapsed, debris everywhere, people ? trapped,” I read over a colleague’s shoulder (it wasn’t my sector). “Yeah, right. Bet a brick has fallen in the road or something. A bit of scaffolding at the most.”
After the twentieth call on the matter, I was being forced to eat my words. Fortunately Ambulance Control always treats every call as given, whether we believe it or not, and a plethora of ambulances, managers, HEMS, the HART team and the other emergency services were on scene straight away. Any nearby ambulance not on a job was ordered to go on standby at the nearby hospital. And yes, the building had definitely collapsed - or at least one floor of it had. Of course, initially we thought of bombs, especially as the building in question was very near to New Scotland Yard (police headquarters), Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament. This theory seemed to be quickly discounted, though, or maybe everyone was just too busy getting people out of the building to worry about why it had collapsed.
All three services quickly declared a Major Incident, which meant that various people in Control put on ridiculous luminous yellow jackets and ran out into the special Major Incident Control Room. Fortunately, our watch recently did Major Incident Training (we got to clamber over all sorts of emergency vehicles, it was great) so we were well prepared. I wasn’t part of the major incident team so I can’t tell you what they got up to in the other room. I stayed in the normal room training Trainee 3 and dealing with the usual nonsense whilst keeping one ear pricked to see what was going on. One casualty was taken to hospital, but there were reports of up to 10 people being trapped. After a while, it was established that there was only one person trapped, so the major incident was stood down from an ambulance point of view (but not from a Fire Brigade or police point of view) and everyone took off the yellow coats and went back to what they were doing.
The man was rescued from the rubble with non-life threatening injuries long after I’d gone home. I read about that in the paper on the way to work the next morning too. The papers are sometimes the only way we get to find out the outcome of the calls we’ve dealt with!
