Lt. Gov. Josh Green was on his way to Leeward Oahu on Friday morning when he made an unscheduled stop on the shoulder of the H-1 freeway in Central Oahu to tend to a 36-year-old man who sustained head and facial injuries in a two-vehicle crash.

The crash occurred on the freeway’s westbound lanes in Waipahu at about 8:40 a.m..

Green, an emergency room physician at Kohala Hospital on Hawaii island, was on his way to attend meetings to discuss the homeless crisis when he saw a white sport utility vehicle partially wedged under a large RRR Recycling Center truck.

“It was a pretty grisly looking accident,” he said, adding a death would have occurred if an individual was in the front passenger seat. “That’s the scary part of this.”

The driver, a 36-year-old active-duty service member, was the sole occupant of the SUV and managed to exit the vehicle before Green arrived. The vehicle’s airbags deployed upon impact.

“He had a lot of glass embedded in his skin,” Green said of the driver.

The truck driver, who did not sustain any injuries in the crash, handed Green first-aid supplies that included gloves, pressure dressings and gauze, which the lieutenant governor used to apply pressure to a deep laceration on the SUV driver’s head.

“It was a pretty complex wound,” Green said, adding the cut was approximately 4 inches long.

He conducted a neurological assessment and asked the injured man questions when he discovered the man coincidentally shared the same birthday as Green: Feb. 11.

His security detail monitored traffic as Green and others tended to the 36-year-old man, who also sustained a fractured nose in the crash.

Police, firefighters and Emergency Medical Services arrived, and the man was taken to a hospital for treatment. Green said the driver was in stable condition and likely will undergo a CAT scan and get stitches. “He’s going to have a little bit of a scar, but he’ll be OK,” Green said.

“What I was most impressed about was how fast the medics got there and how caring the other guy in the accident was. People are always going to step up in Hawaii,” he added.

Green, a 19-year emergency room physician, continues to work at Kohala Hospital one weekend every month.