A rchive Date
[ 23-02-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[Bisons to the rescue
Army ambulances conquer snowy streets
By JASON BOTCHFORD -- Toronto Sun
January 16, 1999
Sun reporter Jason Botchford spent several hours yesterday travelling aboard a Bison with the Canadian military on their rescue missions. His report:
It was the Canadian army to the rescue when a massive armoured vehicle barrelled through a chest-high drift, passing Toronto fire and ambulance crews buried in snow.
And it was just in time for a 19-year-old woman, whose lungs filled with smoke inside a Garnet Ave. home that caught fire around noon yesterday.
"This thing doesn't stop for anything," said paramedic Troy van Overdijk, who was riding in one of four Bisons brought here by the military to help emergency response teams. "This is exactly why we needed it. No fire trucks or ambulances could have accessed this street."
Without the Bison, six paramedics would have had to carry the woman on a pole stretcher through two blocks of snow to the nearest ambulance.
"It wouldn't have been fun," van Overdijk said after bringing the woman to Toronto Hospital's emergency ward, where she was recovering from smoke inhalation last night.
By late afternoon, the Bisons had responded to 18 calls and carried four patients. But one Bison wasn't able to make it to a crash scene where a father and son fell about 30 metres when their truck went airborne off the Hwy. 401 bridge at Yonge St., crashing into the middle of the Don Valley Golf Course.
"I don't like this bridge any more," the nine-year-old boy told a medic after the accident. A medical helicopter had to airlift the boy to Sick Kids and his father to Sunnybrook in two separate flights after a Bison couldn't make it.
"The bridge on the course couldn't have handled the weight of that 13,000-pound vehicle," spokesman Rod Hicks said. Still, Bisons were a welcome relief for paramedics, who have been plodding through snow banks for nearly two weeks.
"It's been all we can do just to access sidestreets, especially when we're helping the elderly," paramedic Paul Wright said. "We went to help a 92-year-old woman and were up to our waist in snow. We couldn't get to the door."
Wright's Bison rides ended yesterday when the heating system went down, limiting the vehicle to last-resort status. Without many emergencies, soldiers took people on a sight-seeing spin around the CN Tower.
"You don't often get a perspective like this," said Master Cpl. John Dunn, as people waved and took snapshots while the vehicle rumbled down Front St. "People seem to love tanks."
Copyright © 1999, Canoe Limited Partnership. All rights reserved.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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