Fire crews use hacksaw to free finger from sofa

Les Barker was throwing away a setee yesterday afternoon when his right forefinger became jammed between the bed frame and metal pull-out mechanism.

A fire crew arrived to free the finger using a hacksaw after a neighbour dialled 999.

Mr Barker's mother Josephine Birkin, who lives with the 50-year-old, said she was alerted to the accident after hearing her son's shouts of pain coming from their hallway.

"The first thing I knew of it were the yelps coming from outside the living room where I was sitting," she said.

"We were frightened to move it in case it pulled his finger off," she said. "I did try to remove it but it was trapped between the metal and the bed like a pair of scissors. I was a bit scared it could cut his finger off."

Mr Barker, whose only remnant of the freak accident is a small plaster covering the wound, said: "I was moving the sofa out on my own it got stuck in the frame of the front door and it would not budge.

"My finger became trapped when the pull-out bed mechanism came up and caught onto it. It was really painful and I could feel a lot of pressure on my finger. I couldn't get to the phone in the house so a neighbour called the fire brigade from their mobile phone."

And he added: "Although I could tell it was not broken I was worried about bruising."

Mrs Birkin praised the speed and professionalism the fire brigade despite, she said, how trivial the emergency may have seemed.

"The fire brigade were not long sorting it out and they were great," she said. "They even called the council to have (the sofa-bed] taken away. We have never had to call the fire brigade before that's why I felt silly by all this carry on. You feel that stupid but I felt like he could have lost his finger."

A fire spokeswoman said: "A crew from Marionville Road attended and used a hacksaw to cut through the part of the bed that had closed around his finger.

"He sustained a small cut to his finger and did not require hospital treatment, so he was left alone to tend to his injuries and presumably his damaged pride."

The incident comes just two weeks after two-year-old Elspeth McDiarmid sparked a 999 emergency when she got her finger trapped in a door and left her mum and brother trapped in a bedroom at their home on Easter Road.

And in May two-year-old Adam Brown caught his finger in the casing of a JCB Tool Bench for nearly two hours before being cut free by hospital staff.