On the evening of Sunday, Aug. 3, Chichester resident Sean Poirier got the phone call of every parent’s nightmares.
His 21-year-old son Cole Poirier was on the line, screaming in pain and calling for help.

“He told me he was hurt really bad on his four-wheeler,” Sean said. “It was a very hard conversation because I can’t hear him because the service is very spotty. He said ‘Fort William’ but I couldn’t get any more information about what happened.”

Sean jumped in his car and raced to the old Fort William hotel on the Ottawa Rier, in Sheenboro. When he got there, he saw no sign of his son, so continued driving the roads until he arrived at the scene of the accident.

According to the Sûreté du Québec report, Cole and an oncoming vehicle collided with each other on chemin Perrault as they were rounding a bend in the road.

Sean said the accident damaged the car and sent Cole flying into the ditch. Police say the driver of the car suffered minor injuries.

“When I came around the corner, the first thing I saw was a smashed up car,” Sean said. “I’m shouting, ‘Where’s my son?’ and they pointed down the road. I ran down there and I saw him in the ditch.”

Sean said when he finally reached his son, only 15 minutes after he had first gotten his call just after 6 p.m., he found him lying amidst the jagged leftovers of the brush that had once lined the road, which had been cut down to a mat of sharp, stumpy spears.

“I don’t know how he landed where he did. God was looking after him. He landed in a spot where he couldn’t even put his hands down to pick himself up because there were spikes,” Sean said.

“I saw him, and I saw his foot. His leg was turned around like a rope and the bones were sticking out six, seven inches everywhere. And there was a huge blood pool. It was just the worst site.”

Sean noticed Cole was shirtless, and then realized his son had used his own shirt as a makeshift tourniquet to tie off his leg above the injury in an attempt to prevent further blood loss. Taking Cole’s lead, Sean removed his own belt to do the same.

“I wouldn’t have put the belt on him if I didn’t see that shirt on him. I never would have even thought about it,” Sean said, expressing awe at his son’s instinct, and ability, to perform critical first aid on himself in that way after having been thrown some 30 feet into the ditch.

Sean said an ambulance arrived he figures about 30 minutes after he first got the call from Cole. He knows Cole called 9-1-1 immediately after the accident, before even calling his own father, and then called 9-1-1 again after the call to his father.

The second call to 9-1-1 lasted about 16 minutes, according to Cole’s phone records.

The ambulance rushed Cole to the Pembroke Hospital, and according to Sean, on its way there was stopped by the police heading to the scene of the accident, who wanted to verify Cole’s ID. This, for Sean, is just one of several points of frustration he has with the emergency response to Cole’s accident.

Dispatching challenges

Sean’s other greater frustration is that no fire department was ever dispatched to the accident, when he knows many of the firefighters in the Pontiac Ouest department live in the area where the accident happened.

“A lot of the volunteers, they live in Chichester, Sheenboro, they’re all there and they’re all questioning why they weren’t dispatched,” Sean said.

“They have the training to control the site and put that strap around his leg. The fire department is usually first on scene. It wasn’t a four-wheeler that went off the road, it was a collision. The air bags in the car went off,” he continued, listing reasons he believes having firefighters respond to the scene would have helped.

“It was lucky the outcome came out as it is. He’s alive. But I’d like to look into this for some other future kid that this happens to down the road, and nobody shows up,” Sean said.

Glynn Fleury is chief of the Pontiac Ouest fire department that should have been dispatched to the call. Following Cole’s accident, he called his dispatcher at the MRC des Collines to understand why his department was not deployed.

What he learned was that his firefighters were not dispatched because Cole called 9-1-1 with his Ontario cellphone number.

“When Cole dialed 9-1-1 to ask for an ambulance, he was obviously using an Ontario dispatcher, because of his 6-1-3 area code,” Fleury said. “It doesn’t matter if you dial for fire, ambulance, police, if you have a 6-1-3 cellphone, you’re going to Ontario first.”

Fleury said when Cole dialed 9-1-1, he asked for an ambulance, so the Ontario dispatcher transferred the call to a Quebec ambulance dispatcher in Gatineau, not to the fire department dispatcher in MRC des Collines.

“Our protocol is we’re dispatched to a fuel spill, a fire, an airbag deployment, injuries, a high speed crash on the 148.” He said if the call had been transferred to MRC de Collines dispatchers, his department would have been automatically called in, given that the airbags in the car had been activated.

“Mostly 90 per cent of the people [in the Sheenboro area] have Ontario area codes, and it’s stressful because when you dial 9-1-1 for a fire, you get an Ontario dispatcher that transfers the information to Quebec, and that’s where the delay is, for about 10 minutes.”

Fleury said firefighters have level two First-Aid certifications, but are not first responders.

“If we would have got called, the only thing we could do is comfort the young lad and wait for an ambulance, but we don’t have the capabilities or equipment to even put him on a backboard.”

Fleury advised residents to get themselves an 8-1-9 number.

“You’ve got to realize, when you’re dialing 9-1-1, automatically ask for Quebec.”

Doctors say Cole saved his own life

Sean said once at the hospital, a doctor told Cole he had saved his own life – that if he hadn’t attached his shirt around his leg in the way he had, he would have been dead before the ambulance got there.

This truth, for Sean, is both difficult to look in the eyes, because it indicates how close he was to losing his son, but is also a point of immense pride for him, evidence of his son’s ability to keep himself alive.

Cole was put into an induced coma in Pembroke, to help manage the pain and make it possible for doctors to get a proper look at his injury. He was soon sent to a hospital in Ottawa, where doctors made the decision to amputate his right leg, below the knee.

Sean says when Cole woke up, groggy from his coma, he couldn’t yet talk, so he was given a pencil and notepad.

“The first thing he writes is, ‘How’s my leg?’ And we had to tell him then,” Sean said. “He just closed his eyes, you could see all his tears coming out, it was horrible.”

Sean describes Cole as an outdoorsman. He works a construction job in Pembroke where he is well loved, and spends much of his time helping his dad maintain his property in Nichabau. He said the long recovery from this accident will be difficult.

He is currently working with a lawyer, who is trying to help ensure Cole has access to proper insurance and medical care he needs to heal. He said police said an investigation into the incident will be difficult, as it happened on a dirt road, and the vehicle tracks were not preserved.

While the journey to recovery will be a long one for Cole, Sean said he wanted to share his story to offer a lesson in the importance of wearing a helmet, and the dangers associated with the lack of cell phone coverage in the area.

“It’s just for people to be aware, and maybe they can complain about it. ‘Hey there’s a lot of accidents, there’s no cell service,’” Sean said.

“And about the importance of wearing a helmet. If he didn’t wear a helmet he would be dead. Helmets save lives.”