Blackrock pensioner died from burns after coat caught fire on electric heater

An inquest heard yesterday that a local pensioner died after suffering burns to more than half his body when his coat caught fire from an electric heater.

Eoghan Carroll (74) died at the burns unit in St James’s Hospital on May 12 last year, four days after he became engulfed in flames at his home at Sandy Lane in Blackrock

Dublin Coroner’s Court heard from Mr Carroll’s neighbour Sandra Meehan that she was walking down the lane toward his house on May 9 when she saw a man “completely on fire” walk out from behind a hedge.

“He seemed completely on fire from head to toe. His whole head was on fire. It wasn’t like smoking, it was complete flames and I could not make out who it was at all,” she said.

Ms Meehan rushed to a neighbour’s house to get help and others came to Mr Carroll’s aid. When the flames were out, Mr Carroll was “very lucid”, said Ms Meehan. He was still walking and said that the back of his coat had caught fire. “He asked someone to cover him at the back and he said: ‘I’m not doing well lately’,” she told the court.

The dead man’s nephew Niall Carroll was on the scene within minutes, arriving as paramedics tended to his uncle. He ran down to check the house and walked into the kitchen. “You could smell that there had been a fire,” he said. He told the fire brigade, who had arrived and were preparing their hoses to put out the blaze, that there was “no need”.

Mr Meehan was initially taken to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda before being transferred to the burns unit at St James’s Hospital where he later died from his injuries.

Scenes investigator Garda Aidan Hanlon said that when he examined the house he could see no seat of the fire and it appeared that Mr Carroll himself had sustained the majority of the fire damage. No traces of accelerant were found. When the power was turned back on, the electric heater in the kitchen lit up, the court heard. Gda Hanlon said that in his opinion Mr Carroll received his injuries from this electric fire.

At post-mortem, the pathologist found that he had suffered very severe full thickness burns on 39 per cent of his body and partial thickness burns on another 12 per cent. Death was due to multi-organ failure as a result of severe burns.

Deputy coroner Maria Colbert returned a verdict of accidental death.

Source: Irish Independent

Man has lucky escape after clothes horse catches fire

A man had a lucky escape in Dundalk last night after a fire broke out in his home on the Castletown Road.

The incident happened around 12.45am after a clothes horse, which had been left in front of an open fire, caught light.

Dundalk Fire Service were called to the scene but the occupant managed to extinguish the blaze before they arrived.

He was then treated on the scene for smoke inhalation by paramedics but thankfully there was no major damage or injuries reported.

Ambulance staff asked to check wheel nuts before starting their shifts by HSE

The ambulance whose back wheel fell off in Dundalk earlier this month

Ambulance staff have been asked to check the nuts on the wheels of their vehicles before starting each shift, it has emerged.

An internal HSE memo was sent to workers recently giving detailed instruction on how to carry out the new required safety check.

The document, dated Friday February 21^st, was drafted just two weeks before the wheel came off an ambulance at the Xerox junction in Dundalk, shortly after it had brought a patient to hospital. It is understood the memo was only issued, however, after that incident.

Staff are said to be angry about the new measures, insisting they are paid to be paramedics and not mechanics.

Lives being put at risk in the North East due to overstretched ambulance service

The front page of today’s Irish Daily Mirror

A report in today’s Irish Daily Mirror has revealed how lives are being put at risk in the North East due to the ambulance service here being crippled by cuts.

The paper reports a series of huge delays in getting to the victims of murders, heart attacks and road accidents in the Louth and Meath area.

As part of the report, Michael Dixon, chairman of the National Ambulance Service Representative Association, claimed we have just one paramedic for every 3,800.

In comparison, there is one paramedic for every 1,500 citizens in Northern Ireland and Scotland.

Mr Dixon said: “These cases are becoming more and more obvious to the public and there is a concern there at the moment.

“We don’t have the resources, we don’t have the vehicles or the personnel at ground level.”

The standard response time expected for emergency calls is 18 minutes and 59 seconds.

However, this time is repeatedly breached and recently the Mirror revealed that 5,000 emergency calls made within the first quarter of 2013 didn’t have an ambulance at the scene within 19 minutes.

The problems in the North East were brought to light last week after a dying man waited nearly half an hour for an ambulance.

Gardai were forced to bring Wayne McQuillan in an unmarked squad car to hospital after he was knifed at his home in Rathmullen, Drogheda, Co Louth, in the early hours of New Year’s day.

The popular 30-year-old died in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital a short time later.

During the recent bad weather, local Sinn Féin councillor Tomás Sharkey took to social media encouraging everyone on the roads to drive extra safely because there were no ambulances operating in the area at the time if they needed assistance.