Luck Was With Him

The last thing Philip Larsen remembers seeing as he drove his Toyota pickup into the intersection of Jamboree Road and Alton Parkway in Irvine was the giant tractor-trailer crossing his path.

The next thing he remembers is a big metal pole next to his head. And then he remembers hearing applause as firefighters, who spent an hour cutting him from his mangled vehicle, pulled him out of the wreckage.

Larsen’s truck had hit the tractor-trailer just in front of its rear dual wheels. It lodged there briefly before the semi’s forward momentum flung it out and sent it slamming into a traffic-signal pole, driver’s side first.

The pole pushed Larsen and his seat into the center of the pickup, the cab of which was crushed into a space barely 2 feet deep.

When rescue workers freed Larsen, the group of about 50 who had gathered near the intersection to watch the drama began clapping and cheering.

The most unusual thing about Philip Larsen’s accident is this: He is alive.

The headline over the small article on an inside page of The Times on Nov. 26, the day after the accident, read “Pickup Driver Survives Big-Rig Collision.” A photograph showed his flattened truck wrapped around the pole.

“My first thoughts were that the person inside the vehicle, if he survived, it would be a miracle,” said Susan Meyer, the civilian traffic investigator for the Irvine Police Department who was the first to arrive on the scene.

Larsen, 45, was not uninjured. His pelvis, tailbone, cheekbone and the bone around his left eye were fractured. He suffered two broken ribs and had cuts on his left side caused by metal and shards of glass.

But after only 4 1/2 days in the hospital, Larsen returned home to Fontana, and his wife, Genene.

Larsen is on pain medication and uses a walker, but he’s expected to be back on his construction job in six to 12 weeks.

Two weeks after his accident, in an interview at his home, he said he has no idea how he survived.

“Whatever it is,” an emotion-choked Larsen said, “I guess I was not done here yet.”

His brush with death brought back painful memories of a car accident a dozen years earlier in Huntington Beach. That accident, in which Larsen was also injured, claimed the life of Genene’s 10-year-old son, Forrest.

While Larsen was still at Western Medical Center in Santa Ana, Genene read him the newspaper account of the Irvine accident. A police sergeant commented that Larsen “was definitely being watched over.”

Said Genene Larsen: “Phil told me it was probably Forrest saying, ‘You have to stay here so you can take care of my mom.”’

Police said Larsen was wearing a seat belt and his truck had air bags, but that doesn’t fully explain why he survived a collision that could just as easily have killed him.

Larsen’s crash was one of 116,679 injury accidents recorded by the California Highway Patrol in the state so far this year. In the same time frame, there were 2,217 fatal crashes. Irvine itself was the site of 333 of the injury accidents, six of the fatal ones.

“The bottom line is he was just lucky, and everyone from the firemen and paramedics, we all felt the same: It just wasn’t his time,” said Irvine traffic investigator Doug Coffing. “We were joking, ‘We’re going to have to have him buy some lottery tickets for us.’ ”

Said Meyer, the accident investigator: “My final thought was, the only thing I can say is I hope I have the same guardian angel.”

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As general superintendent of construction for Newport Beach-based Greystone Homes, Larsen frequently travels the route he was driving Nov. 25.

He had just left a residential construction site in Tustin and was driving south on Jamboree Road toward another site at Newport Coast. He entered the intersection of Jamboree Road and Alton Parkway about 10:15 a.m.

By the time he saw the tractor-trailer traveling west on Alton, it was too late. It’s estimated that both vehicles were traveling about 40 to 45 mph when they collided.

Larsen remembers having a green light, but witnesses told police he went through a red light. It has not yet been determined whether he will be issued a citation. The driver of the tractor-trailer was unhurt, and his rig received only minor damage.

Meyer was assisting a stranded motorist at Main Street and Jamboree a mile away when she received a call from the Irvine police dispatcher, who had gotten several 911 calls on the accident. Meyer was at the crash site in less than a minute.

She said Larsen was conscious and moaning when she approached his truck.

“The only thing I could do was advise him not to move, to stay still and be calm--and tell him the paramedics are on the way.”

Orange County Fire Authority Capt. Jerry Shacklett and his truck company from Irvine Fire Station No. 6, which had been conducting building inspections a couple of blocks away, were the first firefighters to arrive.

“As soon as Shacklett got on the scene, he determined it was a TCCR--traffic collision cut and rescue--with at least a 30-minute extrication,” said Capt. Steve King of Fire Station No. 28, whose engine company arrived next.

King said Larsen’s lower torso, left leg, and both feet were trapped by different pieces of his pickup. “They used every tool on that [fire] truck to get that guy out,” he said.

With 5th Battalion Chief Ron Blaul coordinating efforts, Shacklett was in charge of the extrication team. King’s engine company provided scene safety and fire suppression.

They put down an absorbent, a brown sawdust-like substance, for the oil and other fluids that were leaking out of the truck. King also carried a dry chemical extinguisher, and a firefighter with a hose line stood by in case of fire.

King’s engineer-paramedic Bill Diebold climbed into the back of the pickup to help firefighter-paramedic Brian Bryce stabilize Larsen until he was extricated.

That meant inserting three IVs into Larsen’s arms.

Diebold said Larsen was stable and alert, “but we were afraid the minute we moved all this stuff around him he was going to take the proverbial Big Dumper on us and start bleeding out because he’s compacted.

“When everything is compacted it’s OK, but the minute you move everything away, then you have chances to bleed from large vessels into spaces in your body such as your pelvis, your chest, your lower abdomen.”

Larsen remembers Diebold and Bryce asking him questions as the firemen worked to free him from the wreckage.

“We were just trying to talk to him, keep his mind active so he’s thinking about other things other than what’s going on around him,” Diebold said.

Diebold said Larsen “seemed to be pretty comfortable. He wasn’t screaming or yelling other than when we’d try to move something. When we tried to move the last foot that was stuck, he didn’t like that too much. It was trapped in there pretty well. We probably spent a good 10 minutes on that foot.”

The veteran paramedic has seen similar situations.

“The last person I had wrapped around a pole like that with an extrication problem, he bled out on us after working a good 25 minutes,” Diebold recalled. “We looked underneath and all the fluids that we were putting into him were going out on the ground, so we called him.”

To “call” a traffic accident victim means to pronounce him or her dead at the scene.

King said most accident victims have one hour to get to a trauma center. It’s called the Golden Hour.

With Larsen, he said, “We were approaching the window on that.”

Just before firefighters lifted Larsen out of his mangled pickup, Diebold said, “We moved everyone into position where, when they got him out, it was going to be beat, beat and out of here.”

But even as the ambulance drove off, King doubted Larsen would survive.

“When we took him out, he just didn’t look well. I’m going, ‘He’s got internal injuries we can’t see.’ ”

King believes the Toyota’s air bag helped save Larsen. Otherwise, “he would have had primary trauma from the impact with the tractor-trailer and secondary trauma with the pole.” The air bag “may have prevented him from taking the full impact when the truck wrapped around the pole.”

Added Diebold: “For all the crap that air bags take, they’re worth their weight in gold.”

Larsen’s seat belt also played a part, King said, by keeping him inside the truck.

Still, King said, “I haven’t seen too many with this much compartment damage to where they survive even with air bags and seat belts. There’s just so much trauma that can happen to the body.”

*

Genene Larsen said that when she showed the newspaper picture of the accident to her husband while he was still in the hospital, “He just fell apart. When you see a picture, it’s hard to believe anybody could live through it. So when you are the person who did live through it, you know somebody else is helping you.”

Larsen missed having Thanksgiving at home with his wife and their family. But he was home two days later, Nov. 29, another special day for him and his wife: Their 12th wedding anniversary.

“When he realized it was our anniversary, he apologized that it was not a very good anniversary,” Genene said. “All I could say was I celebrated our anniversary a couple of days early. That’s when the doctors told me that Phil was going to live. I said to him that I didn’t need any present or celebration. That was enough for me.

“It was like getting my husband back all over again.”

Genene Larsen said she and her husband have been overwhelmed by flowers, cards and phone calls they received.

But it wasn’t only friends who showed their concern.

A woman who worked near the Irvine intersection and had watched the firefighters cut Larsen out of his truck visited him in the hospital.

“She said she just couldn’t go without seeing that he was OK herself, and she called once to check on him,” Genene said.

Added Phil, choking up again: “She said all the employees at her work prayed and stuff. You know, that’s what pulled me through.”

And, to those who came to Phil’s rescue, the Larsens are grateful beyond words. Said Phil: “I can’t begin to say thank you.”

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A Crash Survived

On the morning of Nov. 25, Irvine firefighters spent an hour cutting Philip Larsen from his mangled pickup after it collided with a tractor-trailer rig and ran into a traffic-signal pole. Amazingly, Larsen survived. Details of the crash:

1. Police say Larsen ran a red light while heading south on Jamboree Road.

2. The pickup hit the tractor-trailer heading west on Alton Parkway.

3. The pickup briefly lodged in front of the semi’s rear wheels before it spun out and wrapped around the pole.

4. The semi came to a stop and received minor damage; its driver was unhurt.

Source: Irvine Police Department