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Off-duty Irish firefighters save motorcyclist on Spanish motorway
The Dublin firemen were heading for Malaga airport when they came upon a serious accident
A group of Irish emergency workers have been hailed heroes after springing into action when they happened upon a road traffic accident in Andalucía at the weekend and saved the life of an injured motorcyclist.
Dublin Fire Brigade station manager Dave Connolly had attended a conference in Seville with six colleagues, and the group was heading back to Malaga Airport on Sunday 14 when they came across a collision between a car and a motorbike.
"Immediately we just switched into being professional firefighters and paramedics," Mr Connolly said, explaining that they used their rental car to block off the road and instructed another motorist to call an ambulance while they attended to the injured motorcyclist.
Although the victim was critically ill, he was fortunate that Mr Connolly and the officers from Dublin’s technical rescue team reached him less than a minute after the accident had occurred. Any longer, and the man would almost certainly have died on the roadside.
"Unless there's an intervention within one or two minutes, you're going into respiratory arrest and shortly after that cardiac arrest," he said.
"So that patient is possibly the luckiest man in the fact we happened to be driving around at that time – because he wouldn't have survived if they had waited for the ambulance.
"He is still seriously ill but recovering in ICU and we wish him a speedy recovery."
Once the paramedics took over the team hightailed it to the airport and made their flight home to Ireland "by the skin of their teeth."
"There must be Irish in that patient's family because he is just so lucky that we happened to be going past when it happened," Mr Connolly quipped.
Image: Dublin Fire Brigade
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