I was working with another qualified officer from the station while Shelly was on holidays, and I was having a really good time. We had a common interest in science fiction, and in particular, Star Trek the Next Generation, both the movies, and the series.

As it happened, a new Star Trek movie, from The Next Generation, was due to be released on video tape while we were working together. We made a deal to rent the video one night on shift, and watch it during any down time we incurred after the station duties were carried out.

That night arrived. We rented the VHS tape from the local movie rental place and brought it back to the station for later in the shift. It turned out to be a busy shift, in the first half, and we had no idea, just how busy it was going to get later on.

We started the shift at six PM, and we were busy with job after job beyond midnight. It was just before one o’clock when we arrived back at the station. We replenished the stock and cleaned equipment ready for the next job, heated up some food ready to eat and were going to settle down in the station lounge room to watch the video.

I put the video into the player and pressed the play button on the video player at 3 minutes past one and was about to sit down when we heard a noise. It was one of those noises that gets your attention, as you not only hear it, but you feel it as well.

Whoomp!!

We immediately looked at each other. It was a moment when you look at another person and you both say without words, shit!

I said to my partner, the phone is going to ring.

She walked over to the video machine and turned it off, because the remote had been damaged, and we went out into the vehicle bay and waited for the phone to ring.

From the sound of what we heard, something had either exploded, or collapsed somewhere in the neighbourhood, and we were going to get a big job out of it.

True to our estimate, the phone rang a couple of minutes later, and the coordinator told us they had a report of a car and truck smash, with a truck into a wall.

This was the big one.

We were given the address of the incident and were asked to give a report when we got on scene.

We proceeded with the beacons and the siren activated. The location given was approximately 5 blocks away from the station, at Station St and Parramatta Rd, so it didn’t take us very long to get there. Sharon was driving, and I was in the passenger seat as I was the treating officer for the night. When we were about two blocks from the location, we could see a glow over the top of the buildings that was not normally there, as we knew the area fairly well.

The cause of the glow was explained, as we pulled into the intersection of the main road.

There was an inferno on the side of the road, with the remnants of a semi-trailer and prime mover in the midst of it. The prime mover was wedged between a brick wall and a wooden electric power pole. The electrical power pole was at risk of being burnt through, adding to the disaster in front of us. The blinding light was accompanied by a searing heat, we could feel through the open windows of the ambulance, causing us to park further away than normal. We were at least 60 metres from the fire which had engulfed the vehicles, and yet the intensity was such that we moved back away from it to a safer and relatively more suitable location.

What we hadn’t initially noticed next to us at the intersection, was the back half of a vehicle, which we were later to find out, had been sliced in two by the prime mover of the semi. There was a lot of vehicle debris throughout the intersection, and we then noticed a badly damaged panel van in the side street, outside the local pub.

It looked like it had hit something pretty hard, and rolled once or twice. The windows were blown out, engine bay exposed, and the roof was pushed part way down on the A pillars where the windscreen used to be.

Nearby, there was a crowd gathering, watching the voracious fire, consuming the truck and its’ load.

To be honest, by the look of the van, we were expecting dead bodies.

A gentleman, who saw us arrive and get out of the ambulance, came over to speak to us and directed us to a male standing amongst the crowd and asked us if we could take a look at him. We had not identified casualties by that stage, and we were on the hunt for signs of anyone needing our assistance.

Now this guy we were directed to, looked like a casualty.

The first thing I noticed before we even got close enough to speak to him, was that he was very unsteady on his feet, and seemed heavily intoxicated. His face showed evidence of multiple small scratches and lacerations, with minor bleeding. His shirt had minor tears in it, and he was slurring his words.

I asked him multiple times if he was in the van, and couldn’t get a straight response from him, and he kept trying to walk away from me. I ended up taking hold of his shirt sleeve to get his attention, and that is when he turned and looked at me.

There seemed to be a dawning realisation in his face, that I was in uniform, and was trying to get his attention. At that, he promptly turned away from me, wrenched his shirt from my grasp, and started to run through the crowd. I immediately yelled for people to stop him, when two young guys grabbed him and wrestled him to the ground. I immediately ran over and asked them to let him go, as he wasn’t going to run any further.

I later found out that he thought we were police.

This “f”ing idiot was the passenger in the van, and I found out later that they were the ones that caused the accident. I questioned him just prior to the police coming over to liaise with us, and found out the driver of the van, had gone upstairs in the hotel, and had gotten undressed and went to bed, while everything around him was a scene of carnage and death.

The police had gone up into the hotel after talking to us, and dragged the driver out of bed, and brought him downstairs to be assessed by us. The driver was so heavily intoxicated, that he could barely stand, and was continually trying to go to sleep, even during assessment and questioning.

We radioed in with another Sitrep, (situation report) and advised we would need a supervisor and another ambulance to attend, and confirmed that police and fire brigade were on scene. The electricity authority was also requested due to the potential danger associated with the power pole near the fire.

We isolated the passenger in our ambulance per the request of the police and carried out a more thorough assessment and determined that his injuries were miraculously isolated to small lacerations, and he denied any neck or other pain when he finally got around to answer my questions.

It was at that stage that the police brought another male over to us at the ambulance, and asked us if we could examine him for them. He turned out to be the driver of the semi that was on fire, even at this stage. There were at least four fire appliances in attendance at that stage, trying to bring the fire under control. Later, we found out more details from the fire brigade as to what they were actually trying to bring under control.

The semi was transporting over 20 tons of meat, destined for a cannery. Beside the BBQ carrying on in the middle of the footpath, the fire brigade was trying to put out four tanks of diesel belonging to the semi-trailer, and all of the fibreglass in the cab of the truck. The semi was basically a brand new truck, less than 6 months old, and it made a really big candle.

Now the driver was a very lively and chatty chap, who presented with a minor laceration just above the knee. He told us that as he was passing through the intersection, he caught a glimpse of the van as it flew towards him, through a red light (the truck had the green light). The van hit another car coming towards him, and pushed it under the front of his truck. He felt a massive hit go through the truck. He lost all steering on the vehicle, as the car was wedged under the front of the truck, it must have taken out the steering, and the truck slewed across the road, out of control, careening into a brick wall and wedging between the wall and the power pole. He saw flames at the side of the truck, dove across the front seat to the passenger side, grabbed his food esky, and climbed out of the truck, hitting his knee in the process. Just as he exited the vehicle, it became engulfed in flames, and he ran away from the truck.

We were asked by the police to transport the driver of the truck to the local hospital to get his leg checked out, while they questioned the passenger of the van. It was at that point I reminded them that we were unable to locate the driver of the car which was thrown under the truck.

It was the police suspicion that the driver had been trapped under the truck in the front half of his vehicle, which was now less than a metre in height, and was now engulfed in flame. There was nothing we could do here anymore.

We transported the driver of the truck to Auburn hospital as his wound was minor, as requested, then returned to the scene to standby for the fire brigade whilst they were putting the fire out and making the scene safe.

It was then that the police released the passenger of the van into our care.

He was an idiot, this guy. Arrogant, intoxicated and an asshole to boot. On the way to the hospital, I kept reminding him that he’d just killed someone, to which he vehemently denied.

Why did I say that to him you may ask.

Well, while we were waiting around on scene for the police to release this guy into our care, we had a bit of a chat with them and found out some more interesting information.

Apparently, this is not the first time these two guys had come across this intersection, heavily intoxicated.

What they apparently used to do was go to a pub in a neighbouring suburb around lunch time, start drinking until the early hours of the morning, then drive back to the hotel they were staying at. Unfortunately, by this stage they were very intoxicated. The worst was yet to come.

Once they were heading home at speed, when they came to this particular intersection, being on a main arterial road, they used to drive straight through, against the red light, playing Russian roulette with a speeding weapon, not caring who was using the road at that time.

Unfortunately, this time, there happened to be a young guy (police at that stage believed there was a single occupant in the Telstar which was torn in half), coming home from work, completely innocent.

Whoever would think that something as simple coming home from an honest days work, would lead to your death at the hands of some fools.

The other interesting thing we found out was that the driver of the panel van who caused all of this, was found as previously mentioned, asleep in bed in the hotel when they tracked him down. Sound asleep while the truck burned, the guy burned, and the neighbourhood was put at risk. What a tool!

Anyway, we transported the passenger to the trauma centre (a different hospital to the driver of the truck), and informed them that the driver and the passenger from the van were to be kept separated until police had sufficient time to interview the pair of them when they had sobered up, as they were in custody.

After we had transported the passenger, we requested to return to the scene, to back our rescue guys up, looking after the fire brigade as they finished making the scene safe. The police at that stage were performing the scene investigation and telemetry of the incident.

The OK was given, and we returned to standby with the rescue guys. It was going to be their job to recover the body of the driver at that stage, from the what was left of the front of the truck, which wasn’t much.

Parts of the truck and the car were welded together by this stage due to the extreme heat generated by the fire.

It was around eight thirty in the morning when we were finally given the all clear to start the removal of the body, which wasn’t really on our favourite list of things to do. At that stage, we were unsure if we were going to be required to transport the body to the morgue, so we got the body bag out. Eventually, using cutting tools and rams, the vehicle was partially separated from the truck, enough to gain access to what we believed to be the drivers body.

Have you ever seen a large, over cooked roast? Well this was what this poor guy looked like, and was. He was about ninety centimetres in length, and about 40 centimetres wide. The legs and arms were crushed and mostly burnt away. His head was indistinguishable from the torso. He was leaking fluid, like the juices from a cooked piece of meat. This was all that was left of this poor innocent guy. So sad.

We placed him into the body bag, and that was when we noticed something hanging from the body. It turned out to be his leather wallet with his licence in it. It had somehow managed to survive the heat, when so many other things had not.

The weirdest thing that we saw, caused somewhat of a disturbance for us. Where the wallet had fallen away from the remnants of his body, there was a patch of undamaged skin, with hair still intact. This made the realisation that this was once a human being even more prominent in our minds.

We gathered the details, and handed them over to the police.

This would have to have been one of the most confronting jobs in my career, just thinking about how this poor, innocent guy had his life ended by a pair of stupid low lives. I never did find out what happened legally to these two low lives, but I seriously hope it was severe, and a good amount of jail time. No matter what happened to them, it still wouldn’t bring that young guy back, or console his family and friends.