Listened to the sat nav

Paramedics stop ghost truck: “We got lost”

Fabian Blümlinger (left) and Jan Mühlecker stopped the wrong-way driver on the A8.

(Bild: Rotes Kreuz)

Two courageous rescue workers courageously intervened and prevented a lost Indian man from driving onto the A8. The truck driver had blindly relied on his navigation device. Most recently, a wrong-way driver in Upper Austria killed a 19-year-old.

This is civil courage! Two paramedics from the Obernberg am Inn local unit were on the Innkreisautobahn A8 on Wednesday evening. The moment of shock came at the Haag am Hausruck exit at around 8.15 p.m.: "A truck suddenly came towards us," says Fabian Blümlinger (23), who was in the ambulance with his colleague Jan Mühlecker (25).

Blue lights switched on
"We were already in a tizzy. But then we tried to get the driver to stop by flashing the lights. When that didn't work, we switched on the blue lights," says the 23-year-old, who works full-time for the Red Cross. The truck driver finally reacted and stopped his vehicle in the emergency lane."

"Didn't know what we wanted from him"
"We then stopped too. The driver didn't know what we wanted from him. He didn't understand German or English, we had to communicate with our hands and feet," says Blümlinger. After around ten minutes, the police officers requested by the paramedics by radio arrived. When questioned, the 43-year-old driver from India stated that he wanted to drive from Croatia to Germany and that his navigation system had shown him this route.

Proving nerves of steel
He was fined a four-figure sum in euros. After their heroic deed, the rescue workers drove to the police station, "where we had a smoke together and talked about what we had experienced, as we do on every mission". Incidentally, the two men were on their way back from Linz, where they had taken the aptitude test to become emergency paramedics. In any case, they impressively demonstrated the necessary nerves of steel.

No details of the accident
Most recently, an accident involving a wrong-way driver on the A1 Westautobahn near Vorchdorf came to a terrible end. On the night of September 7, a drunk 47-year-old from Kirchdorf/K. crashed head-on into the oncoming car of a 19-year-old from Allhaming.

The young man was so seriously injured in the collision that he died shortly afterwards in hospital. According to an initial police report, the wrong-way driver is said to have been literally bawling at the scene of the accident. Blood was taken from him in hospital. "However, we are still waiting for the results," said the public prosecutor's office in Wels, which is investigating gross negligence manslaughter.

When questioned by the police, the ghost driver did not want to give any details about the course of the accident.