Someone Save My Dummy!
Posted May 10, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It takes a special kind of person to be a paramedic, a firefighter or a cop. They never know what situation they’ll be thrust into where lives are hanging in the balance. So it was with not too surprising dispatch that police in the town of Martinsburg, West Virginia raced to the scene of a terrible accident on Wednesday. The initial report was gruesome – a man was hanging from a utility pole in what appeared to be a deliberate suicide attempt.
Authorities put on their lights and sirens, trying to reach the area as quickly as possible, hoping that somehow they could get to the man while he was still alive. But it was too late. In fact, it would always have been too late. Because the “victim” in this case was never alive at all.
Workers training with the local power company had been using a dummy in an exercise on pole climbing and had simply forgotten to take the thing down. “When we first got out of our cars, we thought it was real,” remembers police spokesman B.L. Yost. “We were, for a minute, wondering how we were going to get the man down off of the pole. It wasn’t until we were able to walk to the side of the property that we realized it was a mannequin up there.”
The utility company has yet to explain its oversight, but it leaves the crew here at SBT with one overpowering question: who’s the real dummy here?
