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Father, son make separate snow rescues
(by Sali McSherry - March 03, 2010)
Father, son make separate snow rescues
By SALI McSHERRY
Larry Parsons and his son, Shaun, were in the right place at the right time.
Within about a week, two elderly women were discovered by municipal snowplow drivers. One was in a snowbank on the curb of the road and the other had fallen in her driveway. Both women were treated by emergency crews, transported to hospitals and later released.
The irony is that one woman, of Pepper Pike, was found by city service employee Larry Parsons over two weeks ago. The other woman, a resident of Orange, was found a week later by Mr. Parson's son, Shaun, an Orange service employee and paramedic.
"We didn't do anything out of the ordinary," the younger Mr. Parsons said.
He said he arrived at the Pepper Pike Service Department before 1 a.m., instead of his usual 4 a.m. snowplowing shift, due to extremely icy conditions. He was driving a salt truck on South Woodland Road at Creekside Drive, he said, when he saw a shadow out of the corner of his eye, near a mailbox, and turned around the truck and did a double take.
That's when he got closer and saw a woman in a robe in the snowbank at the curb. He immediately called police who were in the area and arrived very quickly, said Larry Parsons, who has worked for Pepper Pike for 35 years and is retiring at the end of April.
"Anyone would have done the same thing," he said.
The police and paramedics were the heroes -- they arrived so quickly, he said. The victim was lucky, Larry Parsons said, because typically city snow crews have been shutting down at midnight to save money on salt and overtime and starting back up at 4 a.m. In a different scenario, he said, the victim could have been there for two to three hours, he said.
Shaun Parsons, who has been at Orange for seven years, completed snowplowing roads last Sunday morning in Orange, when he started plowing driveways the village takes care for the elderly or disabled that qualify for the service. When he pulled into a driveway on Walnut Hills Drive, he saw an elderly woman had fallen on her driveway about three-quarters of the way to the street waving her arm back and forth.
Around 7 a.m., the victim had attempted to walk to the end of her driveway to pick up a newspaper, slipped and fell. Shaun Parsons said the woman was on the ground for between one and two hours. Luckily, he said, the incident took place after the snowstorm of the previous two days. She was alert and could talk, he said. Police and fire personnel arrived quickly and treated her, he said.
Orange Fire Lt. Daniel Fritz, who was on the scene to help treat the victim, said, "The patient, in this case, was in desperate need of immediate medical intervention. It's not a comforting thought for me to consider the outcome of this call had she not been found by Shaun. Obviously with frostbite and hypothermia as concerns, I strongly feel we avoided these serious complications as a direct result of Shaun's attention to detail when completing his rapid assessment of this patient."
"It is apparent that Shaun gets his work ethic from his father, and that residents of Pepper Pike and Orange are better served by their dedicated employment," Mr. Fritz said.
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