If there’s any injury I’d least want to have happen, it’d be a crushed pelvis. That just sounds like a big ‘game over’ for anyone, but luckily that’s not necessarily the case. Hopefully a man who suffered a severe injury involving a crushed pelvis while at sea is on his way to a speedy recovery after being airlifted after the incident.
Via Stuff:
The skipper of a fishing vessel who suffered serious pelvic injuries while at sea off North Cape has been winched to safety by the Northland Rescue Helicopter in a daring pinpoint rescue.
The Whangarei-based rescue helicopter responded to a call from the Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Wellington at 4pm on Saturday, having just returned from a previous mission.
The skipper of the 21-metre New Zealand-based fishing vessel Tirere had suffered what was eventually confirmed as a “crush injury”, although details on exactly what caused the injury are still unclear.
Northland Rescue Helicopter chief pilot Peter Turnbull attended the scene and described conditions as being ideal for winching, allowing them to lower a paramedic onto the vessel with a special stretcher for the injured skipper.
St John intensive care paramedic Mark Going, who operated the winch that lowered advanced paramedic Andrew Ferguson onto the Tirere, said the injured man was “in a serious condition”.
While weather conditions were good at the time of the rescue, Going said the area they were winching onto was only a metre wide, and they required help from the Tirere’s crew to get Ferguson safely onboard.
The crew also helped in getting their skipper onto the rescue stretcher before he was winched up to the helicopter and flown to Whangarei Hospital for treatment.
Going described the injured man as being “in a fair bit of pain” throughout the rescue operation. He was in a stable condition at Whangarei Hospital on Monday.
