A 22-year-old Massachusetts man was airlifted to a hospital after he suffered a serious injury snowboarding at Crotched Mountain in Bennington Friday night.
Bennington Rescue responded around 11 p.m. on Friday, Keith Nason, Bennington Emergency Management Director and Assistant Fire Chief, said in a phone interview Saturday.
Initially, Bennington Rescue and Antrim Ambulance responded, but due to “the nature of his injury we really needed a paramedic. So a paramedic was brought in from Peterborough,” Nason said.
The Francestown Fire Department also assisted by setting up a landing zone in a nearby empty parking lot for the Lebanon-based Dartmouth-Hitchcock Advanced Response Team helicopter to land.
Due to a coming storm, it took some time for DHART to find a hospital to fly the patient to. The storm was coming in northwest, so DHART had to find a hospital that could perform surgery on the snowboarder’s leg that was southeast of Bennington.
During this time the patient was in the care of a Bennington Rescue advanced EMT and the Peterborough Fire & Rescue paramedic, Nason said, adding, “The patient was conscious and breathing the whole time and in good spirits.”
The DHART helicopter eventually took flight with the patient sometime between midnight and 12:30 a.m., Nason said, and flew the patient to Lahey Hospital & Medical Center in Burlington, Massachusetts for leg surgery.