'Many survivors will never forget horror of road crash'

ALAN JONES, the accident and emergency consultant at Ipswich Hospital, goes to the scene of about 80 serious road accidents every year.

Often, his attendance at an accident can mean the difference between life and death as treatment in the first hour after a crash is the most crucial in determining a victim's survival. Here, he describes a particularly serious crash caused by drunken driving just before Christmas six years ago in perfect driving conditions on a dry and relatively warm winter's evening.

When I arrive, all I can see are the blue flashing strobes of the emergency vehicles. Then I see a lorry with severe frontal damage and a car crumpled and destroyed, upside down against a wall. I can not even tell the make. Steam rises from it and shiny black oil is spread over the road.

I can hear a man screaming. There is nothing more distressing than hearing the screams of terrified, badly injured people trapped in a wrecked vehicle and it is accentuated in darkness.

It is extremely difficult climbing through the side window, or smashed rear screen of the upturned, mangled vehicle and clambering over a warm, newlydead body in order to reach another victim to protect a neck, clear an airway and put up a drip.

During this process I am cut by shattered glass, contaminated with brain tissue and petrol and have the contents of the driver's stomach over me - the smell of alcohol and sickly sweet smell of warm, fresh blood dries on my hands and becomes sticky round my fingers.

In the overturned car the driver and front-seat passenger are trapped hanging upside down. One rear passenger is still alive and trapped beneath the dead one, making the task of treatment doubly difficult.

The trapped driver is looking down to see the dead passenger, with facial features torn away. He also sees a leg, bent and three knees: one low, one normal and one higher up and hears the victim screaming because white bone is sticking out of his thigh. (Two people died in the crash and two others received serious injuries.)

Sadly, sometimes I arrive too late to do anything but certify as dead, the remains of what, minutes previously, was a healthy, live human being.

For those that are alive, the next excruciating experience is extrication from the wreckage - often very, very difficult - conveyance to the ambulance and subsequent transportation to the hospital. Sometimes a frenzied dash to the accident department ends with the victim dying at the hospital entrance.

Many survivors of road traffic accidents will never forget the horror of what they have seen even through an alcoholic haze.

I doubt if many, even as passengers, will enter another car after having a 'few drinks' with the boys or girls, as the memories of what they have seen must return to them.

(Photograph omitted)