A photographer's video from near 1500 Century Drive in West Boylston showed a Coastal Medical Transport Systems ambulance with heavy damage to its front end and driver's side. The footage appeared to show the ambulance had struck a large construction container.
WCVB reported that State Police confirmed serious injuries and said the crash is under investigation. The available account did not identify who was hurt or provide further details about how the collision occurred, according to WCVB.
State Police Deploy Specialized Units
State Police said troopers from the Crime Scene Services Sector and the Collision Analysis Reconstruction Sector responded to assist West Boylston Police. Detectives from the State Police unit assigned to the Worcester County District Attorney's Office also responded, according to the same account.
The responding units' roles include crime-scene processing, crash reconstruction and detective work. Their presence does not, by itself, establish how investigators view the circumstances or cause of the crash.
Key Details Remain Unconfirmed
It remains unclear whether the injured people were ambulance employees or members of the public. The report described the injuries as serious but did not give further details about their extent or explain how the crash happened.
Ambulance crashes causing multiple injuries have occurred elsewhere in Massachusetts in recent months. In Boston, a crash involving an ambulance and a Jeep sent three people to the hospital, including the patient being transported and two EMTs who were evaluated at local hospitals, according to Boston 25 News. A separate Boston ambulance crash left four people from the vehicle with non-life-threatening injuries, with the cause still under investigation, the station reported in a different incident.
National context, not a Massachusetts tally
An analysis by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found a national average of 24.7 fatal ambulance-involved crashes and 28.4 fatalities per year from 2012 to 2018. Those national figures do not establish what caused the West Boylston crash or who was injured, and they do not answer how many ambulance-involved crashes Massachusetts records show, how severe injuries were statewide, or how those records identify ambulance involvement.
The West Boylston investigation remains underway. The identities of those injured and the circumstances of the collision have not been reported.
