Firemen in Vieira do Minho are up-in-arms over the insistence of an emergency services telephone operator that they try to resuscitate a two-day-old corpse.
As emergency services throughout the country are stretched to the hilt, the firemen were flabbergasted that the operator failed to listen to their take on the situation.
“We told him that the victim was cold and that he had shown signs of being a cadaver for 24 hours, but he would not listen,” station chief António Macedo explained.
The operator working for INEM’s CODU centre for orientation for urgent patients continued to tell the men to work on the corpse while a crack VMER emergency team raced to the scene to provide back-up.
The farce was only brought to a close when VMER medics saw it was a completely lost cause.
“It could have been a crime scene,” Macedo added. “And if it was, the space was not preserved.”
Thus the fire chief has already presented a complaint to the public ministry, while the body of 36-year-old Vítor Vieira has been sent for autopsy.
According to media reports, Vieira was an alcoholic who had been bedridden since the New Year.
