Corinth: four injured in road accident

Four people were injured at midday on Tuesday 18 August in a road accident on the road linking Corinth with Examilia and Xylokeriza. According to the information given by the authorities, a passenger car with four occupants veered off the road and overturned on an adjacent plot of land, leaving all four trapped inside it. Two vehicles of the Corinth Fire Service rushed to the scene and freed them, along with an EKAB ambulance and officers of the Corinth Traffic Police Department. The injured were taken to Corinth General Hospital. No information has been released about the severity of the injuries or the ages of the occupants.

Freeing four people from an overturned vehicle is one of the most demanding operations a fire service is called on to carry out outside a fire. It requires stabilising the vehicle before any movement, hydraulic cutting equipment and coordination with the ambulance crew, so that removing the occupants does not damage the spine. Sending two vehicles rather than one suggests that the incident was assessed as complex from the outset. The time from the call to arrival at hospital, known in emergency medicine protocols as the golden hour, is the most critical factor in the outcome of serious injuries, and on a provincial road network it depends directly on the distance to the nearest unit.

The Corinth–Examilia–Xylokeriza axis is a road of local importance serving daily journeys into the town of Corinth, while in the summer months it takes additional load from traffic heading to the beaches and settlements of the area. It is the type of road network where the largest share of serious accidents in the country has consistently been recorded: provincial roads with one lane in each direction, narrow shoulders and stretches without crash barriers, where a vehicle leaving the road often ends up overturning off the carriageway. For the residents of Examilia and Xylokeriza, road safety on the link with Corinth comes up regularly as a demand addressed to the bodies responsible for maintenance.

The preliminary investigation into the causes and circumstances of the accident is being conducted by the Corinth Traffic Police Department. The inquiry is examining, as in every comparable case, speed, the condition of the road surface, any mechanical failure and whether a second vehicle was involved. It has not been announced whether the prescribed alcohol and substance tests were carried out, details that usually emerge at a later stage of the process. The final conclusions will be set out in the Traffic Police technical report, while the identity of those involved is not being made public. In comparable incidents the completion of the preliminary investigation usually takes weeks, since it also includes a technical inspection of the vehicle. More incidents in the Road traffic section and in the Society section.