Here’s an article I wrote on the topic “What Happens After You Call 911″.

LINK

UPDATE: Democrat and Chronicle

The scale of Sunday’s chain-reaction pileup on Interstate 390 is best described by the numbers:

Thirty-six tangled vehicles.

Twenty-five people injured, including one teenager who later died.
Wind gusts up to 37 mph and blowing snow made seeing past the hood virtually impossible. [snip]

Buses that were headed to the Rochester Institute of Technology to pick up hockey teams were commandeered by the Gates Fire Department and used to keep people warm while the temperature slid to 18 degrees. Firefighters had requested buses as part of the rescue response, West said, but those buses “were in the right place at the right time.”

R News

Emergency crews had to cut four people out of the wreckage. The hardest part was deciding who to treat first.

“They might walk and see a person with a broken arm and say, ‘I’m sorry, you’re going to have to wait,’ as to someone with severe trauma, so that’s the hardest part,” said James Harrington, Gates Fire Chief.

Police say what caused this accident was blowing snow. This part of 390 is located just a few hundred yards from the airport runway. There are no trees to block the wind, causing white-out conditions in a matter of seconds.

A Monroe County spokesperson told R News that the county is not liable for the blowing snow or any damage it may have caused. The county says it is the responsibility of the state DOT to determine whether snow fences are necessary.

At about 12:38 p.m. EST today, the Monroe County 911 Center received a cellphone call reporting a 20 car pileup on I390. In the next few moments, a dozen more calls flooded in. Gates Volunteer Fire and Volunteer Ambulance were dispatched.

Just six minutes later a State Police officer on scene requested “as many EMS rigs as possible”. As late as 12:50 a caller reported that collisions were still occurring.

RNews

White-out conditions are being blamed for a deadly chain reaction crash on Route 390 Sunday. The crash killed a teenage girl.

Le Ngo, 17, of Rochester, died from her injuries following the 36-car pile-up that occurred around 12:40 p.m. in the southbound lane of I-390 near the Greater Rochester International Airport.

Twenty-four others were taken to area hospitals. Lyubov Klepanchuk, 18, was critically injured. The others suffered non-life-threatening injuries.

Motorists say a stopped car was hidden by blustery snow coming off the open fields at the airport. Witnesses say the collisions just kept coming.

“As we’re driving going about 40, 45, there was just a white car just stopped, just in the lane and then out of nowhere we just smashed. And then as soon as we smashed, cars just kept hitting us and it was just never-ending it seemed… It was the craziest experience of my life,” said Erik Ramos, witness.

Strong Hospital reports five people are in guarded condition and another four are in satisfactory condition. Unity Hospital says 12 victims were brought in; six have since been treated and released.

Gates responded, declared a Mass Casualty Incident, and additional resources were requested. The professionals in Monroe County and Rochester City Fire and EMS responded. Chili, Churchville, Greece, Henrietta were among the initial responders from the local region. Rochester City Fire and Airport Rescue responded with extrication tools and manpower. The commercial agencies, Rural Metro and Monroe Ambulance sent ambulances and personnel.

It’s flu season. The local hospitals were jammed. Space was made, people called in, trauma beds made available. One by one the ambulances rolled out with the injured.

The winds continued to blow. The air temperature was 13 and the wind was blowing with gusts over 20 mph. It was bitter cold and the blowing snow made conditions unbearable. These firefighters and EMS personnel did the impossible. They did their jobs.

More help was requested. Spencerport, Hilton, Perinton, Brighton and Irondequoit sent people and vehicles. A staging area was set up at the nearby Public Safety Training Center. People trapped in vehicles were cut and pried out of what was left of their cars. Ambulances continued to transport to the area hospitals.

Mercy Flight was on standby. Other ambulance and fire departments were alerted and manned their quarters or responded to other agencies to fill in for their crews who were out at the MCI.

Honeoye Falls, Brockport, Lima and East Rochester were all called upon. I’m certain I’ve left off some agencies because this was the largest incident in recent memory and a lot of people contributed.

Yes, East Rochester, my medic and I, were asked to fill in at Gates Ambulance base. Our part was very, very small; we never went to the scene and never had to cover a call for Gates. We were there in case someone in Gates needed an ambulance.

By 2:45 p.m. EST, the incident was over. All patients had been extricated and transported. The agencies involved began to recover their equipment and put their rigs back in service.

Curiously, in that two hour time frame, the county was unusually calm. There were a handful of calls but agencies like Henrietta and Gates that have a high call volume were very quiet. It’s as if there was a pause so we could devote ourselves to this disaster.

The lives of a great many people were changed today. The families of the dead and gravely injured, those who were injured or just were in the incident. And, the firefighters and EMS staff are also affected. This is one of those career calls, that everyone involved will remember their entire career. It’ll be the story the old farts tell. It will be the call by which future calls are measured.

As the crews began to return to Gates Base, I could see in their eyes and hear in their voices that change that I am all too familiar with. These brave folks now have an unforgettable memory of tragedy and success, of destruction and rescue. It may be a burden. It may be a blessing.

I cannot calculate the number of people who worked on this call this day. Well over a hundred men and women, mostly volunteers but paid folks too, all professionals. There are people alive this minute because of their work. In that two hour span, safety, succor, life was given as best as could be done by people from all walks of life, from all over the county, working together.

I am proud to be a part of the EMS community in Monroe County. Today shows why.

Volunteers make America a better place. It may be in a museum, with the Scouts, Little League or the thousands who are volunteer EMT’s like I am.

That has value but you wouldn’t know it. Current IRS regulations don’t allow you to deduct your time as a volunteer and you can deduct a measly 14 cents a mile when the deduction for business use of your car is 48.5 cents a mile.

Financial accounting standards for not for profits allow them to record the value of your time as income only if you have a specific skill and they would have had to hire someone if you did not volunteer. As an EMT, that would allow my Corps to recognize my time as a donation, income, but not the woman who is our secretary or the non-EMT driver in the ambulance. The skill, you see.

In other words, a doctor doing painting for a pre-school has no value on the books while a doctor volunteering time at a free clinic does.

I put in, if I do just my required time for duty, meetings and classes, 319 hours a year. That has a value to society, to the Village of East Rochester. It’s an unrecognized value for the most part.

A group called Independent Sector does research into the value of volunteer time. They boil it down by state, and their figures include all sorts of volunteers. In 2006 the nationwide value of an hour by a volunteer was $18.77. Their state numbers dated from 2005, and New York’s average hourly rate for a volunteer was $23.60.

Just my little bit for the Ambulance Corps breaks out to a value of between $5,989 and $7,528. That’s not chump change to me, being between opportunities and all.

Now, they do refer readers to the Bureau of Labor Statistics where our fine government employees track wages by occupation. For May 2006, we discover the following for EMT’s in Rochester New York.

• Mean hourly wage [average of all reported]: $13.57
• Mean annual wage [average of all reported]: $28,220.
• Median hourly wage [half of the wages reported are higher and half lower]: $13.34

The Civil Service rate for a Basic EMT in Monroe County is $12.02 an hour.

OK, so that values my time for the Rochester mean at $4,329 and at the Civil Service rate at $3,834.

We have about 25 members running duty. My hours for the year ought to be about average, though I know that several members easily volunteered over 1,000 hours in the last twelve months. Slapping all the data together shows that the minimum value to the Village for our volunteer labor with the ambulance corps for the last twelve months was $95,860 and the max would have been about $188,210.

Were I able to track each member’s hours, I could obviously come up with a better estimate. But… one of the great things about volunteers is that they don’t track their hours all the time. Our hours are a gift to society, to the Village or to whatever organization benefits from our work.

We’re talking hourly rate here, too. Accounting professionals like myself recognize that you should also include benefits when looking at the cost of an employee. Just statutory benefits alone add 10% to the cost and if benefits like health insurance and other insurances are included the percentage can grow to 25% and more.

The Civil Service rate of $12.02 works out to $25,000 yearly. With benefits, one full-time EMT costs between $27,502 and $31,252 yearly. The ambulance must be staffed by at least one Basic level EMT and a driver. Normally there are two EMT’s in a crew. You need three crews per day if you run an 8 hour shift and we’ll ignore weekends and vacations for now. Your yearly cost to cover five days a week for the entire 24 hours will run between $165,011 and $187,512. To add crewmembers for vacation and weekend coverage will increase those totals.

The Village pays about $8,800 for insurances for the Corps, primarily workers’ comp. That is the only cost to the Village of East Rochester for our personnel. In return it receives well over $95,000 in cost-free volunteer labor.

I think it’s fair to say that volunteers are irreplaceable. Or, to phrase it a little differently, you can’t afford to pay for what volunteers do for free.

So I EMT Saturday and not a thing all day. Usually it’s the busiest day. About three pm we wander over to the fireman’s carnival and sit at the ambulance corps’s tent. Watching the crowd, gossiping, and making catty remarks about how thirteen year old girls dress in public. Got myself a white hot and some fried dough.

4 pm it all changed. We get toned out. Some guy hanged himself. We sprint to the ambulance. Run red clear across town. Fire and police are there. The guy is down and they have oxygen on him. Lousy sounding breathing, slow and raspy. Large abrasion circling the neck.

Cut to finish. In Emergency Department, still breathing. Many, many people working on him. I’m all hot and sweaty and frazzled. Paramedic was super. Fire Department did wonders in getting him out of the narrow room and narrow stair and house to our ambulance.

I’m going to drop a note to our CISD person. Feeling a bit off because of this call.