The October issue of Towing & Recovery Footnotes has my new article, "Towman Down!," on the front page. I've written about business, technical, medical and marketing issues for Footnotes, but this article deals with an entirely new angle: towing specialists who suffered horrible injuries on the job — and with great courage and determination recovered and came back to work as quickly as they could.
The stories of Jason Cooke and Jarrid Mikel are quite moving, and it was a privilege for me to pen this article. Their bravery reflects the best in all of us. Here's a short clip from Cooke's portion of the article:
Jason Cooke pulled his tow truck to a careful stop near the sinkhole. He surveyed the scene in front of him. The excavator — which weighed twice as much as Cooke’s 50-ton wrecker — was drenched in mud, its left track buried in a pool of muck.
Cooke attached four lines on the driver’s side and one line on the passenger side. Another line was fastened 18 to 20 inches behind him. As Cooke began to tighten up the rigging, his equipment suddenly failed him.
“A brand-new 5/8” alloy chain broke,” he recalls, “ and a 12-ton snatch block came flying off the machine and hit me in the left leg.” Cooke was thrown 30 feet from his truck and landed hard in the middle of the highway.
The other members of the recovery team, including Roland Russ and Cooke’s boss Phillip McCorquodale, rushed over to Cooke’s crumpled body. His leg was bleeding all over the pavement; his femur (the thigh bone) was cracked and sticking out. The towers cut through Cooke’s pants to get to the wound, then pulled off his belt and sliced it into a makeshift tourniquet. After wrapping the belt around Cooke’s damaged leg, Russ continued to provide first aid until the paramedics finally arrived.
The EMTs did their best to stabilize Cooke, then rushed him by ambulance to Duplin General Hospital in nearby Kenansville. “While this was going on,” says Cooke, “Phillip made a phone call and got a helicopter in the air.” McCorquodale had grown up in the area and knew that Duplin General would be unable to handle this type of trauma case, so he arranged for a medevac chopper to transport Cooke somewhere else. As the ambulance carrying Cooke pulled into Duplin General, the helicopter was landing nearby.
View clips from this article here.
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