Efficiency of Malaysian emergency services

I know this is totally irrelevant to my blog but I thought that everyone out there reading this should know what I witnessed first-hand last night.

I've lived in the place I'm staying at right now for the past 17 years of my like. Thats like 94.44% of my life in the same apartment, the same room, looking out the same window. I've seen many things in my life- the 30-storey condo across the street get built from scratch, lightning hit a tree by the street below, that same tree get uprooted by wind, a lamp post get uprooted, a car taking a nose-dive into a ditch, an 18-wheeler crashing onto its side and many, numerous, countless accidents involving cars, trucks, vans, motorcycles, you name it.

Many have been simple and minor like a little nick on the bumper by the car behind, stuff like that. Some, not many, have been quite serious. Like the aforementioned car crashing into a ditch. That one needed the service of an ambulance. I still remember vividly that the passengers got loaded onto gurneys and were loaded onto the ambulance.

Which brings me to last night's incident. I'll try to make this short and simple to read. I heard the three common sounds in the usual order- 1. screeching of tires, 2. honking of car horn, 3. gnashing sound of metal coming together. And me being a true Malaysian, a busybody, I went to my window and looked down.

Hmmm, how do I describe this? Okay so imagine a taxi in the middle of a T-junction. A motorcycle all bent and bashed by the right side of the front of the taxi. And about ten meters to the left of the taxi, were two people sprawled on the road.

Of course I saw all this after the fact and I started to interpret what I saw and I made up my own scenario. Here is what I think happened.

The taxi came out of a side road and intended on making a right turn to get onto the main road. In Malaysia if you want to make a right turn, you would have to cross one side of the road, which has a traffic flow going to the left, to get to the other side right? So having made it past the side of the road which is meant for traffic going to the left, the taxi barely made it onto the correct side of the road before being rammed by a motorcycle coming from the right. Being on the side of the road where traffic was coming from the left, and having the mangled motorcycle on the right side, the obvious assumption I made was that the motorcylce was flying down the wrong side of the road when it hit the taxi.

I said the bike was on the right of the taxi and the rider and his/her passenger were on the left side of the taxi. So what do you think happened? I think that the rider and the passenger were flung from the bike, across the hood (bonnet) of the taxi, and hit the ground on the other side, ten meters away.

And then after that people started to stop their cars and bikes and crowded in the middle of the road, backing the traffic up quite a ways on both sides. In the first ten minutes one of the victims on the road didn't move at all, I thought the worst but thought that he/she must've been unconscious seeing that the people around that person were not freaking out that much. The other victim was also on the ground, didn't get up but was moving at least.

It may have been the taxi fault or the motorcyclist was insanely stupid but I don't care and I will never know. So thats almost it for the story. Belowis the real point of this post. Check out the short chronology of what happened.

2020- Crash occurs.

2022- Decided to time the emergency services.

2023- Crowd begins to gather and attempt to help.

2035- Police show up. Start to handle traffic.

2037- Mysterious van shows up.

2040- Injured riders carried into the van.

2041- Van speeds off.

2042- Motorcyclists unite and taxi drivers unite and start to argue.

2050- Sirens heard from afar.

2051- Ambulance arrive at scene to be told by the crowd that the injured persons had been taken to the hospital already.

Sad.

The ambulance came, what, a full half-hour after the accident? And 10 minutes after the victims had been taken away...How can they be called an emergency service when emergencies as serious as a motorcycle accident are not tended to quickly enough?

Luckily, someone had a van to take the hurt people to the hospital. Who knows, they might not have had the ten minutes. It might have been the difference between making it thru the night and not. I may be overdramatizing this but with things like these, we never know. Especially when you're looking on from a window near the top of an apartment building.

Lets just hope the two are alright.