When a man collapsed on an east-side street in the 100-degree heat on Wednesday afternoon, two CPS Energy employees stopped in their tracks to help him.
Faustino Sanchez and James Avila were on their way to a repair job when they saw a young man collapse on North Hackberry Street near Dignowity Park.
“The guy looked disoriented while he was walking down the hill and my instinct was to just go help,” Sanchez recalled.
“We saw him walking and stumble across the sidewalk,” Avila added.
Sanchez said that the man fell face first onto the hot sidewalk. The two men said they jumped in to help.
"We thought he was just a little bit heat exhausted, you know? We've all been there, where you kind of feel a little bit light-headed from the heat,” Avila said. “But once we saw him hit the ground, we just knew it was something bad, so we went over there and helped him out as fast as we could."
Avila said that he’s accustomed to the extreme heat, but the late afternoon sun created an oven-like atmosphere.
“When you're working on it, day by day, it all feels the same. You don't really pay attention to it no more. You just feel the burn, but I put my knee on that pavement and, oh, it was burning it. You could have cooked a hard-boiled egg up there,” Avila said.
"It's not my first time that I've seen a man go down,” Sanchez said. “As far as heat exhaustion or heat stroke, so my first thing was to get him to a shaded place and the only shaded place I had was the bucket truck. So I managed to drag him to the truck to shade him because that's the best I could do.”
The men said that the victim was having a seizure, so they called 911 and followed the dispatcher’s instructions.
“We did the best we could,” Avila explained. “We kept him on his side. The operator told me ‘don’t put anything in his mouth, don’t put nothing cold on his head.’”
Both men say that they were relieved when help arrived and glad they’ve been trained on the job to be safe and keep others safe.
“It was natural instinct to go help someone out, you know? You see them in trouble, so thank God we get trained on it,” said Sanchez, who believes that many people would have kept on driving, but he is glad to be of service. “I know some people just won't help out and people just drive off. We'll help. And it doesn't matter where I'm at. If I see someone in trouble, I'm going to help them out.”
Avila said that it was easy to picture himself needing assistance.
“If that happened to me, I would want someone to come help me,” he said. “I wouldn't want to just be laying there in the hot, seizing up. I would want help.”
Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who saw a tweet about the incident, responded by tweeting:
“This spirit of service is what makes #SanAntonio such a special place to call home. #CompassionateSA.”
“I'm proud of my team, very proud of my team. We're No. 1, " Sanchez said.
Because of medical privacy rules, all we know about the young man who collapsed is that he was taken to the hospital as a Priority 1 patient, meaning there was a possibility of a life-threatening condition.
We wish him a full recovery.