What a fabulous image for International Women’s Day.
Carefree, gallous 90 year old great grandmother Gean Hodsdon , catapulting down the River Tay in a white water raft to raise money for poor families in Moldova. Lunch with friends, she said, would have been too tame. Risk-taking, generous, brave -- Gene’s birthday outing brought a warm glow to Scots and nonagenarians everywhere.
Compare and contrast the fate of 44 year old mother Alison Hume. She died of a heart attack after a mountain rescue team pulled her from the bottom of a disused mine shaft in Ayrshire. She had been lying there for six hours while firefighters stood at the top with ropes they were “unable” to use.
Everyone reading the haunting evidence from the Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI) in Kilmarnock must have mentally traded places a hundred times with those inexplicably hesitant rescuers and somehow rescued Alison. In our minds we used ropes, brute strength, lengths of fire hose, a human tower the height of the hole – we did something as she lay dying.
The professional inaction that night represented a total and shocking role reversal. Firefighters normally tackle dangerous situations the public would avoid. These firefighters avoided a situation punters would have tackled -- without a second thought.
No matter how the evidence is presented, what happened is incomprehensible. A complete failure of nerve in the face of a mere memo. The kind of thing most of us manage to sidestep five days a week.
And if that isn’t shocking enough, two years on, the same thing would happen all over again. Even though there are up to 4000 similar disused mine shafts in Ayrshire, a woman died and firefighters are still emotionally devastated, Senior Fire Officer Freddie Howe told the FAI “we still do not have a line rescue team.” To read more - click here.
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