Good Luck And Quick Action Help Avert Tragedy

By Steve Bigham

Newtown Volunteer Ambulance Corps members Patrick Sturges and Jedediah Kiernan have responded to their share of emergencies, but none of them were as dramatic as the one the two young men found themselves in last Saturday morning.

The two college students were seated in the front room of the ambulance garage on Main Street at around 4:30 am when they suddenly heard a loud bang outside. Flinging open the door, the two men spotted a car smashed up against a tree across the street.

 “Jed called dispatch for fire and police, I ran to the ambulance to get the jump bag with equipment in it, then I ran across the street real quick,” Patrick, 21, recalled this week. “I saw a little fire in the hood of the car and saw the gentleman slouched over in the driver’s seat. I knocked on the window and he moved a little. The door was hard to open and I noticed that the fire was getting bigger. I started to get nervous.”

But Patrick, a senior at Western Connecticut State University, relied on his training to help both himself and the injured driver to remain calm.

“I pried open the door as best I could, checked his neck and helped him out,” he recalled this week. “He wasn’t too bad, just dazed and confused. He lost a couple of teeth.”

By that time, Jed and a police officer were on the scene and put out the engine fire with an extinguisher. Along with corps member Paula Gjerstad, who had been sleeping in the back of the station, the ambulance crew transported the young patient to Danbury Hospital where he was expected to make a full recovery.

“If we hadn’t been awake it would have been a few more minutes before we would have known about it,” noted Jed, 19, a junior at the University of Connecticut. “It could have been a much worse situation. In just a few seconds that fire was going. It spread really rapidly.”

“To be honest with you, there’s no telling what would have happened had it occurred somewhere else, like in an obscure area,” noted Patrick, who lives in Danbury, but chooses to volunteer his time in Newtown.

Later that day, the family of the injured driver stopped by the ambulance garage to thank the two men for, perhaps, saving his life.