Death on a Caravan Club CL

This is a true story: it highlights some problems that you may not have thought about.  Most caravan sites are in ‘the land of no street names’ - similar things may happen to you, so please join us in learning lessons that could save lives.

We run a Caravan Club CL in a quiet rural area, a mile from Ellesmere in Shropshire.  Many of our guests are ‘not in their first youth’ and it is a sad fact that health often deteriorates with age. 

One of our elderly caravan visitors collapsed one evening in her caravan.  She was aged 83 and had a history of minor strokes.  Her husband, I’ll call him Mr. J, was very alert and did all the ‘right things’: he used his mobile phone to dial 999 for an ambulance.  He gave the operator his mobile phone number and our caravan site details.  He also had the presence of mind to run to our house to let us know what was happening.

Unfortunately, the paramedic in the first ambulance got lost.  This is perhaps not surprising as we, like many caravan sites are a rural area with no house numbers or street names.

Lesson 1 – make sure that you know the caravan site postcode. It will help the emergency services find you using satellite navigation systems.  Also give them the land-line number of the caravan site as the Emergency Services’ Control Room can locate the site from the phone number.

The paramedic realised that he was lost and his control room tried to phone for directions.  Mr. J had only given the 999 operator his mobile number, but had since moved back to be with his wife inside the caravan and he unwittingly lost his phone signal.

Lesson 2 – don’t rely on a mobile phone.  In case you are with the casualty, make sure that you know the caravan site land-line number.  If you run a caravan site, put a label on your landline phone that shows your phone number and postcode so that someone else can pass that information if you can’t get to the phone.

With time ticking away, we realised that something was wrong and dialled 999 from the (land-line) house phone.  I was quickly put through to the right people and gave them our postcode and directions, but there was still potential for the ambulance to get lost again, as each postcode identifies the address to within 100 properties (with an average of 15 properties per postcode).

Lesson 3 - put on every electric light that you can, in order to act as a ‘beacon’ to give the ambulance crew  the confidence that they are going to the right place.  In the case of the caravan site, we also had to highlight the correct caravan, so we put on the 4-way flashers (hazard lights) of Mr. J’s car.

Mr. & Mrs. J had a pet dog.  Luckily it was very well behaved, but pets can detect stress and may try to protect their owner from the Emergency Services (or be an over-friendly nuisance).

Lesson 4 – lock your pets away. Mr & Mrs. J’s dog was put in their car.

A paramedic estate car arrived first, later followed by an ambulance and the Police.  In other circumstances the Fire Service might have been called too.  Living close to the English / Welsh border, there was the possibility of duplicate emergency vehicles arriving from outside the area.

Lesson 5 – be prepared to control traffic on, through, and off the site, perhaps asking passers-by or other caravanners to help.

This is not intended as a ‘dig’ at the emergency services, but rather a timely reminder of the rural issues of living and caravanning in a land without house numbers or street names.  We were later told that Mrs. J had died from a massive heart attack, and the best efforts of the ambulance service could not have saved her, but in another time and another place, a bit of forward-planning could make a real difference.

Aside from the lessons above, here are a few other things to think about:

• first aid kit,
• torch,
• reflective jacket,
• fire extinguishers (different types depending on sort of fire),
• do you know where the Fire Assembly Point is so that the person running the site can do a roll-call in case of fire? 
• if you are a CL Owner – in case of a major incident, ensure you fill-in your Booking Diary completely, (including vehicle registrations and mobile phone numbers), so that you can account for who is on your CL and provide the Emergency Services with details of any guests who you cannot account-for?

This won’t have been the first death on a caravan site, and this event in 2006 didn’t put us off running our CL.  We learnt some lessons that we would like to share, and would like to think that our guests are well looked-after with sensible attention to safety.   

The Caravan Club would be remiss if they did not include emergency planning as part of the standard training for Caravan Club Site Wardens, but as CL Owners, we do not receive any training from the Caravan Club and have to apply commonsense and experience.   Sharing our experience in this Discussion Group is another way to learn.

Please talk this over with other members of your family and make sure that children know what to do if parents fall victim to an accident.

Ian Kelly