2.5 years… it took me that long to have an incident with an ambulance. I made it through the snow storm without an accident or incident. I have driven through sand before without problem but yesterday was the day. The day when the East Texas sugar sand was too much.

We were dispatched to a call on a private road. When we pulled in on the narrow road it was gravel but not to far in it turned into sand. The patient was at the end of this, almost 1.5 mile long driveway. I made it to the house but the further I got the worse the sand got. When I got there several trucks were parked and they were somewhat in my way. Knowing that this would be a tricky one I in some way got the truck turned around and could park on more solid surface. When I say solid surface, I mean that the sand was packed harder, to the point the truck wouldn’t sink. But I knew… I knew that getting out of there was going to be a challenge. In the way the truck was situated, uphill with a little bump and after the bump came the deep sand.

Well, we got the patient, got the patient loaded in the ambulance and thankfully it was not a critical situation. Yes, the patient needed to go to the hospital but we didn’t have to rush with lights and sirens.

The challenge was on… and I failed… I started as I wanted, a little bit rough to get the momentum. But, as I anticipated, when the back wheel hit the sand, the weight of the ambulance made it sink.

I knew driving back and forth trying to get it out was worthless. So… another truck was called to take care of the patient and a wrecker requested to pull us out of there. The patient was stable but anxious. We told the other truck to stay at the road and let us know when they got there so we didn’t have two ambulances stuck. Then we would take the patient in one of the trucks to meet them. But the crew missed that part and suddenly they were where right in front of us.
One of the crewmembers in the other truck thought that if we had a hard board that we put under the wheels of our truck we could get it out… worth a try but no success. Only the opposite, we were now almost having the axel in the sand.

Now came the challenge to turn around this other truck that had arrived. There was like a pocket between the trees where it could fit just perfect but it had us make a 10 point turn if not more. But we got out turned around and on harder surface. Next challenge was to get the patient over to the new truck. Thankfully it was also a truck with autoload so what we did was just swapping stretchers. We kept the patient on the stretcher and pulled it through this rough sand. We got our workout done! Teamwork makes dreamwork! The patient took off to the hospital safely with no problem while me and my partner waited for a wrecker.

After about 30 minutes it showed up. And he was not happy. It was going to turn out that he was annoyed because he knew he had problems with his equipment and once he had fixed it he was actually very nice.

Slowly the wrecker was able to pull out the heavy ambulance from the sand and to the harder surface. The marks we made in the sand was huge. Thankfully it is easy to just even out. A call that was suppose to take 30 minutes on scene now took 2 hours… ooops. But no one was hurt and we could continue the shift without any problems so it could be much worse!