LIVORNO. He was He was in the middle of a scuba tank dive on the seabed in front of Castel Boccale. Then, for reasons that are not yet understood, while he was between four and five meters deep, sea water began to seep through the mask. And she had a panic attack, even losing her respirator and no longer being able to feed herself with oxygen.
Tragedy came close to happening just before 11am on Sunday 30 June on the coast south of the city, below slope 3, near Calafuria. A 55-year-old woman from Livorno, who lives in the centre, risked dying during a dive organized with a local diving school. It is thanks to the quick reflexes of her diving companions, who intervened immediately, that she was saved. In fact, her colleagues managed to bring her back to the surface – inevitably not respecting the decompression stages, although fortunately the fifty-five-year-old was not at a great depth at the time of the incident – and then onto the reef. There, as a lifeguard, was a cardiologist, who ensured the initial medical treatment and, together with the other people present, freed her from the wetsuit and all the equipment.
The call to 112 was immediate, with the single emergency center of Florence that – through colleagues in the hospital operations room – sent an ambulance from the Misericordia di Montenero to Romito, with two nurses on board (the first on duty with 118 and the second on hand for training). The presence of two nurses, frequent in this period on the vehicles of the association of Piazza delle Carrozze, was an additional help to the great work done by the rescuers, who after walking down the steps to the sea with all the devices in their possession immediately took care of the woman, who at that moment had lost consciousness. With the oxygen tank and the administration of liquids they were in fact able to revive her, without the need to perform life-saving resuscitation maneuvers. In the meantime, since the rescuers had initially been informed of a suspected cardiac arrest, the “Pegaso” helicopter rescue from Massa had also been alerted, but its intervention was not deemed necessary.
The volunteers of the Misericordia di Montenero, after having stabilized her, then transported her to the hospital thanks to the collaboration of the owner of a villa in the area who, as soon as he learned of the inconvenience, opened the gates to the rescuers allowing the ambulance to park close to the sea (previously it had logically been left on the coastal road). The firefighters also intervened on site, since the possibility of a transfer by sea to the Antignano pier had been aired, then discarded. The woman remains hospitalized in the emergency medicine department, but fortunately she is out of danger.
