Metropol

I read about this in the paper this morning, but have only just seen the video of it.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/a ... 0&ito=1595

It appears to be a catalogue of incompetence. I appreciate that our normally very good Emergency Services were extreemly stretched during the mass flooding which occurred, and I'm sure they helped to save many threatened lives. But in this instance it is apparent to me that more could have been done.

From the video there are many people from the Police, Fire & Rescue and Ambulance service around. But nobody seemed to have thought to put a diver's breathing mask on his face so that at least he could continue to breath if the flood water rose even further or "gushed" over him (as I believe it did for 20+ seconds).

A diver is even seen in the video, so obviously the equipment was at hand. They had up to 4 hours in which to possibly use this on the man himself.

It appears that he was also suffering from hypothermia (as expected) but that can be reversed to an extent, drowning doesn't have quite the same timeframe for correction.

Awful and very sad story. He was only 28, what a terrible waste of life.

If you actually read the article you'd know he didn't drown.

The cause of death with be for the Coroner, not us or the media, to determine.

I suspect it was hypothermia in the end, but the doubt that stays in my mind is the shear relief this guy must have felt when a contingent of Emergency Service personnel turned up to help him (and there seemed to be so many), only to watch him (sadly) die in the end.

I was trying to comment on the fact that even though we have the technology to save (or try to save) people we sometimes don't always act wisely. We are only humans and I don't wish to cast doubt on the abilities of the people there, but hindsight is a wonderful thing and I dread to think how they all feel now.

StuartPlymouth wrote:The cause of death with be for the Coroner, not us or the media, to determine.

Your thread title requires amendment in that case, you appear to have already determined based upon a newspaper article that suggests no such thing.

I will amend the title, it was written with my haste to register my horror, and not necessarily with the intelligence of an editor with more knowledge on the accuracy of short title statements such as that.

It's the Daily Mail so of course it'll moan about the emergency services because they're run by the establisment.