Ahmedabad: When labour pains began for a 20-year-old woman in Transad village on July 25, flooded roads in Dholka made it impossible for an ambulance to reach her home. An EMRI 108 team reached the village but could not drive up to the woman’s location. So, the driver, an emergency medical technician, and two others waded through the water to reach her house and carried her back to the ambulance on a spine board, which is normally used to move patients with suspected spinal injuries.She was taken to the community health centre in Dholka, where she had a normal delivery, said a senior EMRI 108 official.Persistent heavy to very heavy rainfall over the past five days has inundated roads and disrupted transportation across several parts of the state, driving people to call for 108 services for pregnancy-related problems. The teams assisted in around 75 childbirth cases during the period, either taking women in labour to medical facilities or helping them deliver before they could reach a hospital, according to senior officials.In one such case, a woman in her late 20s gave birth to a girl by the roadside near Gangad village. She was being taken from Gangad to Koth, near Bagodara, but the vehicle could not proceed because the road was waterlogged and the woman was already in labour. “With the help of a technician on the spot, the woman gave birth to a child on the side of the road,” said the official.In another case in Dholka, a woman aged about 25 had to be shifted from an ambulance to a tractor after floodwater blocked the vehicle’s path. Four to five people, including residents and EMRI personnel, helped move her. The tractor took her to a nearby govt hospital, where she gave birth.“Complications during childbirth can turn fatal, so timely medical care is crucial in such cases,” the official said.
