by RANDY PADFIELD and GEORGE STAPLETON
At 2305 hours on Monday, December 1, 2014, Cumberland County (PA) Companies 41 and 36 and Rescue 45, Cumberland-Goodwill Emergency Medical Services (EMS), and Yellow Breeches EMS units responded to an accident involving an overturned tanker truck on Interstate 81 North at mile marker 45 in South Middleton Township, Cumberland County. Volunteer fire and career EMS services provide most of the protection for this area. Shortly after the initial dispatch, the Cumberland County dispatch headquarters advised responding units that the tanker truck had left the interstate and crashed into a structure at 2 Jennifer Court, across the street from the area hospital, the Carlisle Regional Medical Center. The vehicle accident alarm assignment was upgraded to a structure alarm response, and redirected units found a tractor trailer milk tanker embedded in a commercial structure with reported entrapment (photos 1 and 2; Figure 1).
However, this was no ordinary commercial structure-it housed an outpatient imaging center containing a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) unit, a radiological imaging center, and a pain clinic. The involved structure was a single-story, steel-frame building with nonload-bearing exterior curtain and interior partition walls, sitting on a concrete slab with a corrugated steel/composite roof deck supported by steel bar joists. The resulting response and recovery operation proved challenging for rescuers as they attempted to operate within this damaged structure and in close proximity to a live magnetic field from an MRI unit.
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