Death and the work of a Vehicle Recovery Operator

Article for Association of Vehicle Recovery Operators, Jan 2021

“We deal with broken-down people, not broken down vehicles.”

Mac Hobbs, of Hobbs Recovery Services in Eastbourne, is featured in a podcast this month, talking about the emotional impact of his work as a recovery driver.

The podcast, Dead Honest, interviews professionals who work with death, so how did producer, Georgie Vestey, come across Mac Hobbs?

“It was a chance remark, to be honest,” says Georgie. “I was interviewing two coroner’s officers who deal with suicides at Beachy Head and they said, ‘Once we remove the body, we need to get a recovery driver to remove the vehicle’. I was totally blown away by that. It had never occurred that someone would have to do that job.”

But this is not the only traumatic aspect of Mac’s work. Attending fatal accidents can also take its toll. “I remember one incident when a car went under a lorry and it took all day to extract the vehicle. It was clear the driver of the car was dead, but we could see there was a baby seat in the back. For that day, nobody knew if there was a child in that seat or not. Fortunately, there wasn’t but I’ve never forgotten it.”

Helping the family after a sudden road death

Getting the vehicles back to the garage is not the only challenge. Mac has to deal with the families left behind. “Some families don’t want anything to do with the vehicle, they don’t want the memory back. Others will open the doors and take something small, like a few coins in the ashtray. I think it’s just having that connection to that person.”

Georgie asks Mac how he deals with those families? “It’s a moving feast. Some people become so distraught that you can do nothing to console them. You just have to let it take its course. Some are very angry. Others will accept a cup of tea and share the whole story. And that has an effect on our staff. It can be very, very upsetting. A lot of the time we are dealing with broken-down people, not broken down vehicles.”

So how does Mac decompress after being exposed to such tragedy? “We just get back to work because other people need our assistance. We do offer counselling to our staff. But I don’t like to dwell on it. There may be some people in this industry with what you might term PTSD, that don’t know it yet. They put in a box and shut the lid. And that could well be somebody like me. Who knows when the lids might open on those boxes.”

Georgie Vestey interviewed Mac for Road to Nowhere, Ep.10 of the Dead Honest podcast.