A portable building that fell off its jacks while being prepped to move crushed a construction worker at El Camino Hospital Thursday afternoon. His injuries were so severe that an emergency crew rushed him to a higher-level trauma unit at Stanford Hospital, where he was in critical condition last week.
Mountain View firefighter Lynn Brown said construction workers at El Camino Hospital had propped up the portable building in two sections on jacks and were in the process of putting wheels under it so they could move it to another site when a 45-year-old contractor working with them crawled under the building apparently to help maneuver it. The building fell off the jacks and crushed the man, Brown said. A standard 10-foot-by-10-foot foreman’s trailer weighs about 3,200 pounds, according to one manufacturer of such buildings.
An emergency room doctor from El Camino Hospital ran out of the hospital to the injured man in the parking lot a few feet away and determined that his injuries were so severe that they required care from the Level I Trauma Center at Stanford, which provides a higher level of care than emergency centers, Brown said.
Trauma centers are required to have specialized doctors on staff. They are a higher level of emergency room care.
