A woman was hospitalized in serious condition after being rescued from a trash truck Monday afternoon in Manchester, fire officials said.
Fire Chief Ryan Cashin said the rescue was one of the most unusual his department has made.
“We definitely don’t train for people in garbage trucks,” Cashin said.
The operator of a Zero Waste & Recycling compacting truck was driving in the area of 193 Beech Hill Drive in Manchester around 12:49 p.m. when he glanced at the vehicle’s onboard camera system and saw a woman in the back of the truck, Cashin said.
“There’s a camera in the truck that shows inside the back of it,” Cashin said. “The driver noticed someone on the camera and called 911.”
Cashin said the woman, who was not identified, ended up inside the truck after the driver emptied a dumpster. The driver had reportedly “compacted the garbage up to four times” before noticing the woman, officials said.
Contact was made with the woman through a side access panel, Cashin said. She was standing and talking and yelling, but not alert enough to answer questions.
“Firefighters assessed the situation and realized the only way to get her out was through the top of the truck, which was open,” Cashin said.
Crews lowered a Stokes basket — a metal wire or plastic litter widely used in search and rescue operations — from the bucket of a fire department ladder truck.
The woman was rescued from the truck in about 15 minutes, then transported to Elliot Hospital for treatment of her injuries, which Cashin described as “serious but non-life threatening.”
Cashin said the woman was not homeless.
“We’re still looking into how she ended up in there, but I can say she was not unsheltered,” Cashin said.
This was a situation where firefighters’ training — and their ability to adapt that training to any situation — paid off.
“This is a high-risk, low-frequency event,” Cashin said. Technical rescues are not usually that short, but no two are ever the same.
“I can’t say enough about the professionalism, the precision that the firefighters used to get that victim out in a quick amount of time. Their training and their experience really came through, and I’m proud of the firefighters.”
