Air ambulance defies strong winds

The air ambulance was called to the harbour of Vueltas in Valle Gran Rey, La Gomera, at lunchtime yesterday after an elderly tourist with a heart condition became ill aboard an excursion boat, obliging the vessel to return to port. The emergency services had been called who sent a medical team, and the air ambulance also arrived despite the very windy conditions experienced yesterday. The patient was removed from the excursion boat under medical supervision and brought to the air ambulance which then transferred the seriously ill tourist to the university hospital on Tenerife. 

It is always amazing to watch the skill of the helicopter pilots of the emergency services, especially in the very windy conditions experienced yesterday which forced the chopper to come in at a very low altitude at what appeared to me a wobbly, crazy angle and later having to take off again in the dusty and gusty conditions.

Serious motorbike crash in Arure

A motorcyclist was severely injured yesterday afternoon when his rented bike left the road and he subsequently collided with a rock near the cemetery of Arure, a mountain village in the municipal area of Valle Gran Rey on La Gomera. The German tourist in his mid-fifties suffered multiple serious injuries and was first transferred by ambulance to the quay in the harbour where an air ambulance landed immediately after. It took the emergency services more than an hour to stabilise the patient sufficiently for further transport by helicopter to the university hospital on Tenerife.

Arure, taken from near the scene of the accident