Traffic police cleared a path through heavy rain on Thursday evening to move a donated heart from Don Mueang Airport to King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital in 19 minutes, the 197th heart the unit has escorted across Bangkok.
The radio room of the Royal Initiative Project traffic police took the call at 5.15pm on October 22, at the end of the working day and in the rain.
The unit sent a rapid-response team, mechanics and traffic officers. They worked with local traffic police, the expressway police and staff from the Expressway Authority to hold the route open.
The running count gives a sense of how often this happens. On February 3 the same unit moved the 156th heart from Don Mueang to Thammasat University Hospital in 14 minutes, then the 157th from Saraburi to Ramathibodi over 109 kilometres in 55 minutes.
That is about 40 hearts in eight and a half months.
Pol Gen Itthipol Atchariyapradit, deputy commissioner-general and head of the force’s traffic management centre, praised the officers involved and thanked drivers who pulled over in the rain.
Pol Lt Gen Nithithorn Jintakanon, assistant commissioner-general and his deputy at the centre, said the public had shown that a wet evening and slow traffic need not stop a transplant run.
He said that however hard the rain falls, the heart does not get wet.
Neither the donor nor the recipient has been identified, which is usual in these cases, and no outcome from the transplant has been announced.
The force asked drivers to pull aside for emergency vehicles and organ convoys, which is the part of the operation it cannot provide itself.
It gave 1193 for the highway police, 1197 for the traffic police division and 191 or 1599 for the police generally, all staffed around the clock.
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The story Bangkok police run a donor heart from Don Mueang to hospital in 19 minutes as seen on Thaiger News.