“We were led by maintenance to the basement of the apartment building here and we found a female who was severely entrapped, severely entangled in the actual trash compactor in the basement,” said Nick Judge, a district chief for the Dayton Fire Department. “We recognized right away that this was going to be a very, very lengthy and very complex extrication — a very lengthy rescue operation.”
Judge said CareFlight and Miami Valley Hospital staff and experts from Montgomery County Waste from Republic Waste were called in to help, and they called a manufacturer in Alabama with additional knowledge on the equipment to take it apart without causing further complications.
“So basically without a picture, it’s kind of hard to explain, but basically between the trash chute that connects all the floors comes down. And then there’s a compactor with a big piece of steel that comes through and compacts the garbage and pushes it into a container where they can get the garbage out and she was stuck in that small opening compacted in,” Judge said.
Maintenance workers came down to the basement to clean out the trash compactor, as they do daily, and heard yelling. As they started to move stuff away they saw the woman’s legs and called for help, he said.
It is not known how the woman came to fall down the chute, nor for how long she had been trapped. Judge said said it took them an hour and a half from arrival to freeing the woman, and that crews got her out alive but in “very critical condition.”
Physicians and a surgical team from Miami Valley Hospital responded to the scene for life-saving measures above and beyond what rescue crews can typically do, he said.
“I can’t get into exactly what was done, but I can say that it was very helpful having the staff from CareFlight and the staff from Miami Valley here because we did everything that we could in our scope of practice,” he said. “And our protocol is life-saving measures.”
Judge said crews worked in the basement at the lowest level as well.
“I can’t think of another time that’s happened in the city. We’ve had people that have gotten into the trash chute before, but not into the actual compactor. So this was a new challenge for us and that’s something that’s very difficult to train for,” he said. “But our guys did a great job getting her out in the safest, most efficient, quickest way that we could and give her the best fighting chance to survive.”
Dayton Police are handling the investigation.
Credit: Jim Noelker
Credit: Jim Noelker
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