Monika Sanchez lost her three-year-old daughter in a road-related accident in 2003. In the years since, she has been the first to arrive on the scene of two different crashes on Melbourne’s roads.

Here, three people describe what it was like arriving first on the scene to a crash, exploring the effect it has had on them, their loved ones, their driving and their attitudes towards road safety.

To the end of July this year, 729 people have died on Australian roads, 75 more than the same time last year. It is particularly bad in Victoria: 186 people have lost their lives on the road, compared with 128 this time last year.

But they are also stories that illustrate the ripple effect of road trauma, extending beyond the injured victims to those who witness horror on the roads that often stays with them for life.

Many of their stories are heroic, reflecting the best of human nature and the strength shown when shock threatens to overwhelm the senses.

They say the images of mangled metal and chaos will never leave them. Five, 10, 20 years after one of the worst days of their lives, those who have inadvertently been the first on the scene of horrific crashes are reminded by every ambulance siren, every police cordon, of the carnage they witnessed on a road.

I didn’t actually know where they had taken her. I didn't pursue it, maybe because I was involved with the grief from my daughter. Maybe I felt I couldn’t take more on board.

I explained and we got her talking, and even laughing. I said, ‘They are coming, the ambulance are coming, can you hear them?’ And they took her away. She passed away in hospital.

She was a nurse on her way to look after somebody. She was conscious and she was talking to us. I was pressing the cloth on her head. It was amazing, she never spoke about pain. There was bewilderment. What happened to me? She was just driving along, thinking about the holiday she'd booked with her husband and now she's in this car and doesn't know what happened.

Then I tended to the other person. She had a big cut on her head. The ambulance over the phone said go to her and try to explain to her what happened and find something to put on the cut so I ran to the car, grabbed something from there.

The feelings didn't hit till later on in the day when your adrenalin is gone and you're left with a picture in your head and a situation that you're trying to make sense of.

I rang the police and ambulance and they told me to attend to the first person, but he died there. I did try to rouse him, he didn’t look very injured at all but he looked up once then he passed away. Trying to take in what I was confronted with, there was no time to feel anything, only pure survival. I didn't allow myself to feel much, I think that's because I wouldn't have been much help to the emergency worker.

I was driving our son to school on a beautiful, sunny morning at about eight o'clock in 2008. We turned the corner and were faced with two cars opposite one another on the road, and this beautiful fog everywhere. It was really surreal. A bus driver runs to me and says, ‘I can’t stop but there is one dead and one badly injured.’

Then after that, once the ambulance arrives, you see the person relaxing, because they are hanging on to wait for help and you are there every step of the way, trying to talk to them, trying to engage them, talk about their family and what they do and once the ambulance arrived you could see him go, ‘Oh’. They seem to relax and that’s when the bleeding starts. I was absolutely blown away by the tolerance of pain. He didn’t scream or carry on, he was incredible.

It seemed like a lifetime – by the time you make that call to the ambulance and you wait. It wasn’t a lifetime but it feels like a lifetime. I said to him, ‘It’s not looking very good, but you never know what they can do these days.’ I don’t know whether I did the right thing or not – you try to stay honest but not honest to the degree where the person loses hope.

You basically just talk to the person. He was conscious and answering his questions because he was extremely bewildered. We were just trying to comfort him, you know. I took his phone after a while and said, would you like me to call his family, so I did that.

I thought I was dreaming, to be honest. Having attended an accident before, I sort of went into survival mode. What has to be done? It was mainly trying to stay with that person – there was not much first aid you could do. You feel really helpless because you want to do something, but what can you do? There’s an open break, there’s a foot half missing, so what do you do?

Straight away I did a U-turn and came back, hit the skids and stopped, and then found him with his leg pretty mangled and his foot hanging on a thread. He had a femur broken, an open break.

Then, in 2010, I was taking my son to basketball training. It was another beautiful, sunny day. I remember the sun being in my eyes and being very cautious. I’m very cautious because of what happened to us previously. I was trying to concentrate and my son was just being happy in the back of the car. And next thing I see someone flying through the air, I don’t know how many metres, and it was just surreal. It was almost like a movie.

It’s the suddenness of it. You can go about your day and all of a sudden it’s changed forever. You had no say in it, no say in influencing it. It’s sort of a helplessness because there’s nothing you could have done but all of a sudden you are there in this situation. How random. And once you’ve seen something you can’t unsee it.

You can go about your day and all of a sudden it’s changed forever. You had no say in influencing it.

And you tend to be very alert. When I see near-misses, my anxiety starts coming up. Or when I pass an accident that people are already attending to, I just feel for them immediately. Because I think, I have been there, I know what the person goes through that has the accident, and also everyone else around them.

I had a period of time where I was very angry on the road when people did silly things. Because I’m thinking to myself, you just don’t know what you can cause with this. Can’t you see? But they can’t see because they haven’t been involved.

That was the last one we attended. My son was on the scene of both as well. It’s had a very long-lasting effect on me, and my son particularly. You then tend to drive differently. I always say to my son, 'You don’t drive just for yourself, you drive for all the other idiots out on the road'. Do not assume. Always try to think.

I visited him with another man who helped on the scene. He was actually happy to see us and we have been in contact since. But, of course, it has changed his life forever. He lost his leg.

Then we just stayed and stayed until they airlifted them. Afterwards, I didn't go to basketball training. I went home. I was very anxious for the man because I was hoping for his family that he would actually be OK. I was very anxious about that. You are trying to process it and you just tried to cling to the hope they could save him. I was OK driving home but I was shaking and, basically, you have some really restless nights.

As we were driving towards it, you could see the flames underneath the car. I pulled up and I went to the passenger side of the car and shouted, ‘There’s a lady in here.’ It had hit the tree so hard everything was concertinaed so the motor was pushed in on her.

We jumped in the car and ran. We knew it had hit the tree, but we weren’t quite prepared for it until we were there, for what kind of dilemma we were in. The contents of the boot were on the other side of the paddock. That’s the first thing we saw, the rubbish strewn right back over to the other side of the fence.

Next minute, I remember jumping. It was a bang. It was like a bolt of lightning or a large clap of thunder hitting the tree. We just looked at each other and we could hear a car horn just going.

It was an autumn day in 2005 and Darren Southon broke from his normal routine to have lunch with his wife, Kerrie, at home. Standing in a paddock on their property, they heard a car go past at speed.

Darren Southon was at home having a cup of tea with his wife when he heard a bang on the road outside his property. Credit:Justin McManus

I just want to tell people who find themselves at the scene of a crash, don’t be afraid. You don’t have to be an emergency worker, a paramedic, you just have to be a person that cares. That’s what matters. Don’t be afraid just to hold someone’s hand and say, 'Mate, you will be all right. We will get through this.'

People don't believe it can happen to them. It happened to us three times. I can't believe that we've been part of this so many times. You think, ‘I'm a good person, I’ll live a good life, nothing is going to happen to me.’ That’s rubbish. It just happens so quickly.

We could hear a baby screaming. The flames were licking underneath the car and you could feel the heat. My wife went round to find the baby and I was trying to search for the seatbelt. I could remember the woman was slumped back over towards the passenger side and there was blood everywhere. You were starting to think at this stage, I don’t want to see her burn alive. That was the biggest fear. You don't know how long you’ve got.

It all happens in a matter of minutes, seconds. It feels long but it's not. Darren Southon

It's hard to explain but it all happens in a matter of minutes, seconds. It’s just minutes. It feels long but it’s not. You get a rush of adrenalin. My wife ran to the side door. The car was smashed up but the door was ajar a little bit and she found the buckle and got the baby boy out.

Everything was critical in that time. The fire was really taking off. So I said to her, ‘Quick go to the shed and get the fire extinguishers’. Kerrie laid the little boy on the back seat of our car and drove to our house to give the baby to our young daughters. We just had to get him away.

When she was gone it seemed like an eternity. By that stage, the woman was jammed in the seat, everything was pushed in on her. I had to climb over her to get in the back of the car and break the back of the seat. I leant over and pressed the button on the seatbelt and got it off.

I got out and fell on the ground, then I got up and leant in and grabbed a hold of her like a rag doll because you had to do what you had to do.

The car was getting really alight. I sort of fell back and slipped and lost my footing and she wouldn’t come. The pedal was through her leg, so I had to lift her back into the car, put my hand in, pull the pedal out of her leg and lift her out again.

I was relieved to get her out. She had blood all over her and my wife had blood on her and I remember my wife looking at the blood and I was saying, ‘Come on love, help me, help’. I was buggered by then, I was struggling just to pull her. She was lying right beside the car, I just wanted to get her away. I knew it was going to go, I knew it was going to explode. It was just a matter of time.

We dragged her only about two metres, which seemed a big way at the time. Once you get the adrenalin, you get a burst and then you start to fatigue. It hits you. As quick as it hits you all of a sudden it seems go, to drain you. This was all happening in a matter of minutes. You haven’t got time.

Then we could hear the sirens. She was in a bad way. A ute pulled up and a CFA bloke ran over and then we picked her up and carried her [by her] leg and arm like a wounded soldier. We carried her across to a tiny tree in the shade and tried to check her, checked her pulse and she was breathing but gurgling a lot. I was getting anxiety then. I didn’t want her to die.

The police came and the chopper came. I reckon it was an hour they were working on her. They took her in the helicopter and rushed to hospital.

Straight after, I went to work. I had to. Straight away. I think that’s what helped me. I didn’t like letting anyone down so I went to work. I'm the sort of person that needs to be doing something. And I think it helped me deal with it.

It was also too surreal and I went back to work thinking, ‘Did this just happen?’ You couldn’t comprehend it. I remember I was driving a bobcat and I was thinking, did this just happen? And of course it did, I still had blood on me. I came home and I think it started to sink in what had happened. I was thinking, strewth, I hope she’s alright. And I was thinking about the little one.

They both survived. The woman had an acquired brain injury. Her mum and brother would come round every Christmas for a few years and bring a present around for the girls. It was lovely. I went and did a few jobs for them. I used to go up the road and I would see the young boy.

I remember the first day we went over to to visit the woman, I don’t know how long it was after the crash, maybe 18 months. I went over there and it was pretty emotional. She held my hand and wouldn’t let go. She was aware. Her mum was saying, ‘This is Darren, he got you out of the car.’ And she grabbed my hand.

For six weeks afterwards I didn’t really walk down that way, near where the accident happened. Your sleeping pattern is mucked up. I didn’t sleep well for six months. Especially if the chopper went over. If you are awake, or the chopper woke you up, you probably didn’t go back to sleep. Still to this day, when I hear the chopper, it’s the same. When we hear the chopper go over we think, ‘That’s some poor bugger.’

The images in the folder in the back of the head, they come knocking at times. But we keep them there. If you see a massive accident, you do have a flashback. Basically my biggest picture is of when I was pulling her and she wouldn't come, and the car on fire, and of the car actually exploding. Those are the main graphic things I always remember.

And I’m not going to lie, you have tough days, but I think that’s all part of the process. It makes you appreciate things more, and one another, and you don’t take things for granted because that lady – it could be my girls, my wife that it happens to, tomorrow, next week, next month.

I started to look around and see people’s behaviour on the roads a lot more. It was a lot more noticeable and you think to yourself, this is one of the most dangerous things you can do.

I did drive differently. That was an immediate impact for me. That was straight away. In a sense, before the crash I was probably not concentrating 100 per cent in the sense you would be driving and thinking about other things. I think that is the precursor to a lot of accidents. I found myself more attentive on the road.

It goes back to normality. It’s funny. I felt as though there is probably nothing any more that I can do to help so I sort of pulled back. And you sort of had to do that as part of the healing process. I think subconsciously that’s what happens. You want to see that what you did wasn’t in vain and they were all right. But you want to get back to normal. You need to get back to normal.

You’ve got to tell yourself,you were lucky you were there for that person. You have to tell yourself, if they were in the same situation they would be grateful too. There are no winners with it all.

You’ll never erase the images. And I think that’s what road trauma is. I think you get a tattoo from it. That’s what it is. It’s a tattoo. Everyone touched by road trauma, they get a tattoo, whether they like it or not.

Wendy Taylor witnessed an accident outside her workplace almost 20 years ago. Credit:Simon Schluter

Keen motorbike rider Wendy Taylor was walking near her workplace 19 years ago just outside the Melbourne CBD when she heard a loud crash.

It was this big bang and then silence. And then I look and there’s this motorcyclist with his feet through the front passenger window of a car. The rest of him was lying on the ground and he was trying to get his helmet off but he was not fully conscious and he’s fitting and really struggling.

This bloke dashes across the intersection and said he had just finished his level two first aid certificate. He took charge and said, 'Can you hold him down and keep him still' because the motorcyclist was really fighting us.

He kept fitting and his eyes were rolling back into his head and he was jerking around. We got his legs out of the window. In the front passenger seat was an elderly man with a trickle of blood down the front of his face. The driver of the car, he got out of the car and he was wandering around this big intersection, just wandering around.

We were focused on the motorcyclist. I was still holding his neck and shoulders and it was about comforting him. The first aid man was shaking at what was going on and he did a fantastic job.

When the motorcyclist was lying there on the ground, he had this clear fluid coming out of his ears. Later I asked my paramedic mate about it and he said it means the brain has been compromised. Between the brain and skull there is a layer of fluid and that protects you. If that’s coming out, then this guy has got a brain injury. You could tell with his eyes rolling back that all his neurons can’t make sense of the world anymore.

We were about 120 metres from a fire station and so the firies were the first to arrive and then the police arrived and did the traffic control.

At some stage we were superfluous to everything happening. I left and walked up to my meeting and no-one said anything. I was at the meeting and came back a few hours later and the rider’s bike was on the far side of the intersection just sitting there.

Then life went on. There was some debris on the intersection but, for all intents and purposes, life for everyone went on. And I was shaken up by it. I went home that night and then the next day I came into work and was wondering how he was going. He was in his late 20s or early 30s.

I rang the nearby emergency department and they couldn’t find him. They said, 'There is so much going on, particularly with road trauma, we can’t pick him out.' I was shocked that this event that had been so shocking, so catastrophic to me, was actually nothing unusual in the scheme of road trauma.

I was shocked that this event that had been so shocking, so catastrophic to me, was actually nothing unusual in the scheme of road trauma. Wendy Taylor

I started doing some searching online about road safety and found there was this whole world I didn’t know about. There was an amazing statistic that was like one in four car crashes with serious injuries, 25 per cent result in an acquired brain injury. And I was just gobsmacked. I was thinking, it’s 2000 – how can that be? And it was just a world had opened up to me and I just thought, rather than going around in circles trying to track this one person to see how he is, I’d be better off as an experienced motorcyclist putting my time and energy into making sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else.

I found that, at the time, VicRoads oversaw community road safety groups so I joined the one for inner Melbourne and within about four weeks, I went to the first meeting. And in a couple of years they were sending me to annual road safety conferences, getting exposed to research and academics and senior police and then, within about three years, I was actually presenting at a conference. It took off from there.

I had the commonsense to say, 'I'm not going to find this guy so why don't I put my energy into something so no one else has to confront this again.'

Here I am 19 years later. Now I’m active with the Australasian College of Road Safety, it’s another whole different world – researchers, academics, there are practitioners and I’m now the secretary and treasurer of the Victorian chapter. I am also an independent rider representative on a panel advising the Victorian Road Safety Minister about motorcycle matters.

That day was just really confronting for me. I guess I was a participant in that idea that being on the road is about me getting from A to B and I wanted to do that quickly and if that means I drive or ride at 62km/h instead of 60km/h, or if I put my foot down for the light changing to get through, being impatient with other road users, saying this is my space and I will protect it.

The first lesson I learnt was that road safety isn’t about me, it’s about everyone. It was really humbling to find that out. Over time, I came up with a mantra that I try to practise: patience, courtesy and forgiveness.

There is also this really fine line between someone dying when they crash, having really serious injuries or nothing serious at all. It’s just millimetres or micro seconds and it’s just, in many ways while the fatalities are awful, but what sits under that is a heap of appalling, permanent, life-changing injuries.

It’s almost as though the challenge is a need for the community to actually experience the grief of road trauma before it happens to change their attitude and behaviour so the road trauma is avoided.

It was a pivotal day. It was the day that I stopped thinking about myself. I was in my late 30s and it was probably overdue and it was the day a new world opened up to me and I realised I have got something to offer which is experience as a motorcyclist – and it’s time to start giving back.

What to do at the scene of a crash Call triple zero as soon as possible. You will likely be asked the exact location of the crash, the approximate number of casualties, the type and extent of injuries and whether anybody is trapped.

Try to provide first aid to casualties. A comprehensive list of important things to check, including whether the person can breath or whether they are conscious, can be found here.

Switch off the vehicle’s ignition and shut off the emergency fuel switch of a diesel vehicle.

Ensure the scene is safe. Use hazard lights on vehicles and switch headlights on at night. See if there is someone who can direct oncoming traffic in the area.

Calm and reassure loved ones who might be distressed by the crash scene if possible.

Keep away from fumes from leaking petrol and if the accident involves a vehicle carrying hazardous materials, stay clear.

Unless absolutely necessary (for example if the vehicle may explode), do not move a patient until help arrives as it could lead to further injury.

If the casualty is conscious, continue to reassure them and explain what is happening. Let them know that help is on the way.

Wait until emergency services arrive. Source: St John Ambulance Australia

Road Trauma Support Services Victoria offers free information and counselling to anyone impacted by a road collision 1300 367 797 | www.rtssv.org.au