I will tweet more later about this but wow yesterday was a terrifying lesson and reminder about the importance of fieldwork safety planning and how I need to do better. NEVER do fieldwork alone or let your students do so, please! Accidents happen. Have plans/first aid training.

Everyone is ok but it could have gone less well and we were unprepared for a medical emergency in a variety of ways and it was definitely the scariest day of my life.

Just for the record this situation was entirely our responsibility (a project we got a small grant that has nothing to do with our current employer). We were super lucky, and we will be learning from this experience so we can be much better prepared in future.

OK. I am going to write here about what happened, because I think it will help me to process it, and if others who read it learn something that helps them to be better prepared for an accident &/or avoid a tragedy, that will be a positive outcome.

Sean and I were doing fieldwork this weekend at a provincial park with a field assistant (& our dog). We are surveying the diversity of spiders and ants in coastal sand dunes in Nova Scotia. It was the final day of our survey, and we were about to go to check traps.

Our field assistant slipped and fell on a rocky area of the beach. They hit their head on a rock. They sat up, initially seeming ok, talking, and then we all realized that they were bleeding quite heavily from a head wound.

Sean quickly used his shirt to apply pressure to the wound & try to stop the bleeding. Then our field assistant's legs started shaking. I realized they were in shock. Then they started seizing.

I did not have my cell phone on me (it was in the car, almost out of batteries). Sean was holding our field assistant and continuing to apply pressure. I managed to get his cell phone and call 911. This probably cost us an extra few seconds but it felt like forever.

On the phone with 911, I was able to tell them the name of the park we were working in, but I did not know the street address or gps coordinates. It took a while for both me to be able to confirm with the dispatcher that they would be sending the ambulance to the right place.

Meanwhile, our field assistant was having seizures. Sean got them into recovery position. They lost consciousness for a little bit, then had another seizure. The dispatcher needed me to go back to the parking lot to meet the ambulance. I left the phone on speaker with Sean.

LUCKILY we had not yet gotten all the way to our field site. We were right by the stairs down to the beach, but still a good 500 metres or so from the parking lot. Again, it felt like an eternity, but by the time I got to the parking lot, I could hear sirens.

By the time I brought the EMTs down to the beach (I think this was probably about 15-20 min after the fall), our field assistant was conscious. They also had a dislocated shoulder. Then I went to go meet the firefighters who would bring a stretcher.

Our field assistant was taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital, which was about 40 minutes away. They immediately got a CT scan, and the results came through within a couple of hours.

Ultimately, they walked out of the hospital with 3 staples in their scalp and a concussion. (I said earlier "everyone is ok" and that was not really true. A head wound and a concussion are serious. But I am so thankful the outcome was not worse).

As I said at the beginning of this thread, I have never been more scared in my life. It was a terrifying experience, but it could have been much worse. We were incredibly lucky in a lot of ways. And I will learn from the mistakes we made & our lack of planning in this instance.

Luckily, we had one charged cell phone and cell service.
Luckily, Sean remembers some first aid training from when he was a lifeguard a couple decades ago.
Luckily, we were only about 500 metres from the parking lot.

Luckily, there was an ambulance nearby & a hospital reasonably close (and we are in Canada so no one will be bankrupted by hospital bills).

But we did not know this beforehand, & we should have.

Our purposeful emergency preparedness on this trip amounted to having a first aid kit in the car (not on us. not helpful).

We also didn't have emergency contact information for our field tech (but we were able to get it in a roundabout way fairly quickly).

Also, the one field safety protocol I've always followed is to never do fieldwork alone. Something like this could easily happen to anyone, anywhere. And if you're in shock, having seizures, you will have a have a hard time calling for help (assuming a phone & service).

But just being with someone else is not enough. Sean and I often do fieldwork together. He knows some first aid, but I remember next to nothing from the one course I took over a decade ago. If he got hurt, I would be useless. We need first aid training yesterday.

Also, we should have had actual plans in case of emergency. Known exactly where we would be & where nearest emergency services were, & whether we would have cell service (& if not, radios/alternatives).

I will note that none of what happened here is unique to fieldwork. The same kind of thing could have happened if we were just going to have a picnic on the beach. But when you are in charge of a project, safety is your responsibility.

I know lots of folks who have done fieldwork for their MSc or PhD alone. I used to go out as an undergrad with a PhD student and neither of us even had a cell phone. Field safety plans for "just going to a beach" seem silly until an accident happens & someone's seriously hurt.

Anyway, I need to wrap this up for now and go to bed. We will be reading & learning a lot more about field safety (and chatting with our neighbour who offers first aid training ASAP!) and planning accordingly in the future.

I don't know why this sort of thing isn't a normal part of our training. We are required to take lab safety courses, but there is nothing similar required before doing fieldwork (at least in academia).

OK. It's been a long weekend, now I will sleep. Our field tech is safe and doing really well, considering. Thanks for listening, please don't do fieldwork alone, and please think carefully about safety for you and your trainees!