Francisco Palma dangled upside down, his right leg caught and mangled in the teeth of ditch-digging equipment resembling a giant chain saw. Only his head and shoulders touched the ground.
A trencher caught the pants leg of the 46-year-old construction worker last week. It flipped him over and nearly severed his leg.
Frisco firefighters reached Palma just five minutes after the accident, but they couldn’t free him. His leg would need to be amputated right there, amid the dirt and rocks.
Luckily, there was a plan for that. “It’s like trying to get a symphony together,” Dr. Mark Gamber, an emergency room doctor at Medical City Plano, said later.
“To have all of these processes come together, especially the first time you put it into play, I think that’s one of the things that’s special.”