Man saves life of farmer trapped under half a ton of hay – by using an app
A man saved the life of a farmer trapped under a massive bale of hay by using an app to guide paramedics to the field.
Michael Moss, 39, heard farmer Stephen’s calls for help while eating lunch in his garden in Worksop, Nottinghamshire.
He followed the voice across some fields and discovered the man crushed beneath a industrial-sized hay bale weighing around 500kg.
Recalling the ordeal on June 23, he said: ‘I was working and had been eating a sandwich outside before my next meeting.
‘It was about 1.25pm and I could sort of hear a noise coming from about half a kilometre away.
‘Where we live is very rural, when you hear something unusual you twitch your head.
‘I heard it three times and thought that’s definitely not a good noise. I had to investigate what the noise was.’
Michael then ran through woodland in his flip-flops, still holding his sandwich, and as he got closer to the noise he heard it was a man’s voice screaming ‘help me’.
‘I could see a tractor cab parked. I was worried what I was going to face now, is he impaled, who knows. That really triggered how am I going to deal with this.
‘He was severely injured under the hay bale, it’s not the first thing you’d think to see.
‘I’ve approached the tractor from behind, something has fallen from the forks that he’s been working on.
‘I saw the hay bale and a top half of a body. I tried to shoulder barge this huge half tonne hay bale but that didn’t work.’
Unable to move the bale himself, Michael quickly called 999. But he knew he’d find it difficult to describe their exact location so used an app called what3words, which encodes geographic coordinates into three permanently fixed, random words.
By telling call handlers the words ‘dads’, ‘scorched’ and ‘hairstyle’ medics were able to pinpoint where he was to within a three-metre square radius.
The ambulance then arrived within 15 minutes and took Stephen to hospital, where he was treated for severe trauma to his pelvis and femur.
Although a serious injury, dad-of-two Michael believes it could have been much worse if it wasn’t for the what3words app.
He said: ‘I was thinking about how to describe where I am for emergency services. A previous boss worked in the emergency services and said I should download what3words, but this was the first time I’d ever used it.
‘As I’m on 999 they ask where we are. I said I’ve got what3words and they said that was good. She knew exactly where I was instantly.’
Paramedics were soon at the scene and gave Stephen pain relief before taking him to the nearest hospital an hour away.
Michael said he was also able to help Stephen phone his farm hands who also arrived at the scene to try and shift the heavy bales.
He added: ‘Stephen was on the phone to his farm hands and they thought he was taking the p**s. They started to arrive after about five to 10 minutes.
‘There was another hay bale above him, it had slipped. That was above his head, it was starting to slip near his head.
‘You could hear the relief when we got the hay bale off and he tried to move about. At this point we became best mates.
‘The best way to describe his lower body was like a squashed frog. His leg was in an unnatural position.’
Michael praised the app, saying it ‘can save someone’s life’.
What3words works by dividing the globe into a grid of 3m x 3m squares and gives each square a unique combination of three words.
The technology is said to now be used by 85% of the UK’s emergency services.
Last week a mother who had a heart transplant last year described how her daughter, now six, saved her life twice using Amazon’s Alexa home assistant device.
Emma Anderson, from Robroyston in Glasgow, was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy just before she turned 16, which makes the heart muscle too thick to function correctly.
She told her daughter Darcey from a young age that she had a ‘sore heart’, and taught her how to use Alexa to call for help, which she’s done on two occasions.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.