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US ambulance (symbol photo)
Photo: CALLAGHAN O'HARE/ REUTERS
Is this training really worth it?
Many employees will have asked themselves the question - even during a first aid course, because afterwards many are unsure whether they could really help in an emergency.
It should be different with two employees of Lewiston Public Works.
Their main task is road repairs, they are employed in the administration of the 37,000-inhabitant city of Lewiston in the US state of Maine.
In a training course, they had learned how to use a tourniquet, i.e. a tubular bandage that can be used to tie off limbs.
When do you need such knowledge?
Like when you meet a man holding his own severed arm.
According to reports from the AP agency, such a person stumbled across the path of the road workers.
»Divine Providence«
"It must have been divine intervention," says Mary Ann Brenchick, the boss of the two.
“Two of my best people happened to be working on the sidewalks nearby.
There couldn't have been anyone better for this situation than the two of them," she praises.
Witnesses told the Sun Journal that the man appeared to have severed his arm in an accident at work, a cut near the shoulder.
The road workers stopped the profuse bleeding with a tourniquet while waiting for the ambulance to arrive.
Derek St. Laurent, a police officer who also attended, later said of the pair's bandage, "It probably saved the man's life."
Little is known about how the accident happened.
Police forces followed the trail of blood to a commercial area.
There, several witnesses stated that the man had worked with a band saw.
The emergency doctors expected him to survive the accident.
It is not known whether it was later possible to save the arm in the hospital.
mamk/AP
