Last December,
a 737 crashed at Denver International Airport (DIA), the fifth busiest airport in the nation. Everybody got off that plane alive, and initially city officials said they were proud of the response. But KMGH-TV CALL7 found life-threatening problems in ambulance response times.
Investigative reporters Tony Kovaleski, Arthur Kane and Tom Burke, and photographer Jason Foster,
worked on the project. They found that the first ambulances sent to the scene responded in a "non-emergency" manner. It was not until 12 minutes after the crash that the first EMS dispatches were told to respond with full lights and sirens.
The ambulances didn't arrive until 33 minutes later, and it took an hour to get 10 ambulances on the scene. Remember, DIA is one of the busiest airports in the country
but, until this crash, there were no ambulances stationed full-time there.
The TV station dedicated a half-hour of prime time over the weekend to explain its remarkable findings.
You can watch the special investigation here:
The station reported:
Five minutes after the crash, Denver Health's records show "Denver EMS dispatchers have not yet been notified" even though they sit less than 30-feet from the fire dispatchers. The first call about the crash came in at 6:23 p.m.
It added:
The CALL7 investigation found the delays continued during the first, critical hour. Three ambulances were at DIA 40 minutes after the crash and five ambulances were there 50 minutes after the accident. It took a full hour for just 10 ambulances to arrive at DIA.
I like how (in part 2) the station compares the December crash to how departments in other cities responded. It gives a nice context by which to measure the response. The station found a wider problem than this one incident:
"We're understaffed," said one paramedic who declined to be identified for fear of losing his job. "We have half as many ambulances as our next closest city."
The investigation found that 12 percent of the time Denver Health ambulances exceeded the national-response standard.
A review of two months of calls also found that 88 calls exceeded 20 minutes and some patients waited more than 30 minutes.
Managers also failed to address the problem of so-called "frequent fliers" -- patients who repeatedly clogged the ambulance system with fabricated emergencies.
"It happens every single day," said another paramedic who also declined to be named. "I've seen some people hundreds of times. We probably take six to 12 people to the hospital every single night just because they know the right things to say."
The station has reported on slow response times to the airport before.
Here are stories from just before the Democratic National Convention came to town.
The Rocky Mountain News also reported the story.
I interviewed
Kovaleski to find out more about the project. His edited purposes are below.
How did you hear about the problems that developed after the crash? After all, nobody died in the crash, and emergency officials initially said they were proud of their response. We have known about the problems inside the dispatch center and with Denver Health for nearly a year. Since last May, we have aired almost a dozen stories exposing problems with ambulance response times in Denver. Following December's plane crash, it was a logical request to see how the ambulance system worked on the night of a mass casualty incident.
A source informed us about a report that had been produced in the 911 call center that had details about the ambulance response. We requested the report, received it, reported the initial response numbers and continued our digging. Through sources, we also uncovered a source to the scanner traffic/recordings from that night.
After
our original report, Denver Health's chief operating officer sent e-mails to KMGH TV's news director and general manager claiming our reporting was inaccurate. The hospital's own records, however, later confirmed our reporting was accurate.
It's also intriguing to note that there was a major backlash against the city of Denver's open records clerk for providing us with the records we used to report the original story. It was and is an open record, but others in the city tried to say it was protected information because of an ongoing National Transportation Safety Board investigation.
How could it be that fire dispatches knew about the crash but EMS dispatchers sitting nearby didn't? This is one of the issues we have raised that the mayor says must be addressed. Clearly there is no connection between the two dispatch locations despite their close proximity. I am told this is part of the process that is now under review.
How difficult was it to get your hands on dispatch records and make sense of them? Obtaining dispatch records was tricky. Denver Health has repeatedly attempted to protect its records under a variety of shallow excuses. We did get records from the city through open records requests and we also obtained records through various sources inside the system.
You found slow response times even on days when there was no big emergency. It seems like this angle is something others could examine in their own towns. What should they look for? How did you calculate response times?Before the response to this plane crash, we had produced a series of reports on the problems with response times throughout Denver and particularly at DIA. We discovered DIA was the only airport of the five busiest in the country without an on-site ambulance.
It's an airport that has an average of 130,000 people each day and an average response time of 15 minutes for emergencies, with the ambulance on average coming from 12 miles away.
Our reporting leading up to this special report forced the city, Denver Health and the airport to station an ambulance at the airport. The process had been underway since August, but the ambulance was not stationed at the airport until a few weeks after the crash of flight 1404.
My advice for reporters is to spend some time understanding your community's emergency response system. Make contacts in the call center and with the emergency responders. Calculating response time can be tricky, and usually varies from community to community. But, response times should follow the National Fire Protection Association standards. Denver is currently changing how it calculates response times as a result of our investigations.
The mayor has asked for response times to be calculated from the time the call taker understands the emergency. In the past, they were calculated by when an ambulance was available to respond to a call (this could produce a several minute delay). Bottom line is that many emergency response systems have found ways to manipulate this critical number. Denver was clearly one of these systems.
