Like clockwork, first responders answer the call to action

Once again North Big Horn County first responders rose to the occasion, giving aid and comfort to the victims of a horrendous fireworks accident moments after it happened on July 4 west of Cowley. First responders at the scene said it was one of the worst fireworks accidents they’d seen in years. There were four victims, all with massive injuries.

“This was one of the more dynamic, unscripted, strange and chaotic fireworks accidents that we’ve had in quite a while,” said Big Horn County Sheriff Ken Blackburn. 

The call came in to Big Horn County Sheriff’s dispatch at 4:54 p.m. The location was mile marker 244, about a mile and a half west of Cowley on U.S. Highway 310. Stacey Hiser and his wife, Michelle, happened to be driving down the highway when a vehicle a few cars ahead of them exploded into flames. A local farmer, Chris Crosby, was nearby irrigating one of his fields when he saw smoke. Sheriff Blackburn, who was on vacation, was a few minutes away hooking up a team of horses for an upcoming celebration. He got a call from Crosby. 

“Come right away. I just witnessed a serious accident. It’s right near your house,” Crosby said.

Blackburn stopped what he was doing and was at the scene within a minute or two.

Greg Rael was getting ready to host his family’s annual community fireworks party. Volunteer firefighters and off-duty medical personnel were already well into celebrating the Fourth of July holiday with their families. Everyone stopped everything they were doing and rushed to the scene to help. 

Within eight minutes, Lovell Fire Chief Mike Jameson arrived with about a dozen volunteer firefighters and four fire vehicles. Blackburn flagged him in. 

“Do you have a first aid kit?” he asked.

Jameson handed him one. Then he and his crew shifted into high gear, directing traffic away from the vehicle and dousing the flames with water, until the load of water on the first truck ran dry. They doused the flames again with water from a second truck, until the fire was out.

“The Lovell Fire Department was as impressive as always,” Crosby said. “They always get there so fast and are so efficient.”

Two ambulance teams arrived and went to work. With four seriously injured victims, the crew needed all the help they could get. At that point anyone with any kind of medical training assisted the ambulance crew in any way they could. Whether it was helping lift patients onto gurneys or simply comforting those in crisis, everyone was engaged.

Shane Brost, the school resource officer for Rocky Mountain High School, arrived on the scene. He recognized one of the most seriously injured victims, Tucker Schulenberg, as a student at the school. Brost comforted the boy and tried to keep him conscious during the ordeal. Blackburn said keeping the youth conscious may have saved his life.

“When I got there, the vehicle was fully engulfed in flames, and bystanders on the scene were helping get the occupants out of the vehicle,” Blackburn said. “So, first thing, I assisted with that. As we were getting people out of the vehicle, the vehicle started burning hard, and fireworks started going off everywhere. Now the vehicle started really actively burning, and there was an explosion. I don’t know if it was the gas tank, but there were several large explosions as the vehicle began burning actively. 

“Everyone was out of the vehicle before law enforcement and medical help arrived at the scene. It was very intense. It was obvious that the patients were in a critical state.”

According to Blackburn, bystanders like Crosby, the Hisers and others were some of the first people there to heroically attend to the victims. Crosby went so far as to declare the Hisers “the heroes of the day.”

Blackburn said a close friend of two of the victims (Sierah Martin) was following the vehicle when the accident occurred, with two young children in her car.

“Obviously, she was very distraught, and the children were upset to witness something like this,” said Blackburn. “The Crosby family graciously took the children to their home while their mother dealt with the situation.”

Crosby said it was just instinct to shelter the children from seeing such a horrific accident. 

“I didn’t want them to see what I was seeing,” he said.

He brought them to his nearby farmhouse where his wife cared for them until relatives of the children arrived and took them into their care.

“We grabbed the kids and took them to the house,” he said. “I could see they were really young, like under five. It was no big deal to do this. It was just the right thing to do.”

Blackburn said he could see the victims had extensive burns on their bodies, estimating that some were burned on as much as 70 percent of their bodies including on their arms and legs. At that point he called dispatch and alerted them that extra ambulances and medical helicopters would be needed. He told dispatch to give first responders a heads-up that they would need to be prepared for extreme trauma measures. 

He said it was obvious that some of the victims had very deep burns often referred to by medical personnel as “full thickness burns” over large areas of the body. He said there were concerns about the airways being burned on some victims.

“In situations like this, inhalation of chemicals and heat are always a concern,” he said. “It was a very large-scale emergency requiring all medical personnel to participate.”

The ER

Like clockwork, the emergency room staff at North Big Horn Hospital readied itself for an influx of severely injured patients. Their recently remodeled emergency room was built for this. 

“When we do have traumas or multiple traumas that come into the facility, we’re really grateful to have space to care for those patients in a respectful, dignified and professional way,” said North Big Horn Hospital CEO Eric Connell. “Most days we don’t have five or six patients in the emergency room at one time, but there are those moments when we need all the space we can get, and it’s so nice to not be working out of a room with a curtain across the middle.”

Providers and other medical staff dropped what they were doing and came to the emergency room to help. It was an “all-hands-on-deck” moment. 

“I was pleased to hear from the team that we have a reputation during one of those hair-raising, get-your-adrenalin-pumping type of emergencies; the reputation is that our people show up,” said Connell. “We have people who do that. We have multiple providers who show up. They come from home. 

“During this event, the team proved why Lovell is a great place to live, because this is a place where the community cares and where we take care of each other. Even when it’s fireworks time and barbecue time, people show up anyway.”  

Blackburn also praised the hospital staff.

“The medical staff did a great job responding to the accident,” said Blackburn. “The ambulance people are quite the heroes; they deserve a lot of the credit. They did a fantastic job of organizing the medical concerns, calling for helicopters and the North Big Horn Hospital trauma team was activated, so they had a chance to get extra help in the emergency room on this holiday weekend.”

Connell said he recently saw a study that stated that the probability of dying from unintentional injuries is 50 percent higher in a rural area than an urban area. 

“That’s probably because most rural areas don’t have the resources like we do to prevent that,” he explained. “I think in our area we have a dedicated community of search and rescue volunteers and firefighters. Together with our EMS team and hospital staff, it allows us to close that gap. 

“Something like this only happens here once every so often, but we’re ready for it. All of that chaos at one time would have put a strain on even a bigger city ER, but we handled it and we handled it well.” 

Blackburn noted the massive response by first responders and others in the community.

 “I think the big story here is that so many people on a holiday weekend, due to their dedication, quickly left their celebrations to come to the aid of these victims,” he said. “The fact is that every one of these medical providers left whatever party or celebration they were at to be present at the hospital to help these patients was amazing. Our hats go off to our healthcare providers for that and to our firefighters and law enforcement people and bystanders in the community who did the same.”