Well, if you were to believe the sensation of liberal media news, that’s what you would think. Last night there was a Continental Airlines airplane flight 1404 that skidded off the runway at Denver International Airport (DIA). No one was killed and all the injuries were minor. One trauma red from what I hear, the rest were yellows and greens.
It’s really hard to determine how bad the incident really was. The news media will do its best to sensationalize the whole thing. Its not as if the plane was careening down the runway doing cartwheels with body parts flying everywhere and flames shooting hundreds of feet in the air, but they want you to believe that so you’ll watch their news, up their ratings, and get more sponsors. Its all about money to these folks, not responsible news reporting.
Yes, the plane did skid off the runway, its not in millions of pieces, but its never going to fly again. Some photos from 9news.com. From what interviews with officials are saying, it seems that yes this was an emergency for sure. The passengers were evacuated with emergency procedures and the plane did catch fire. Kudos to Denver Fire Dept’s ARFF team. It sounds like they had a good working fire when they got on scene.
I was working that night and my company sent some ambulances to Denver for mutual aid. It was a Mass Casualty Incident (MCI). We tuned in to the mutual aid radio channel for Denver Paramedics to listen to the traffic. It sounds like they called in a few different agencies to help with transporting patients from DIA and for back-filling for their regular call volume. There was a bit of confusion at first in determining where patients were being transported, but that was corrected shortly. Denver Health hospital is the zone master for Denver. This means that when hospitals are on divert (the emergency room is full and not accepting patients because it is unusually busy) or during an MCI, the ambulance transporting calls to the zone master where they determine which hospital to transport to. This makes sure that one hospital isn’t overrun preventing best possible care for each patient needing care. During an MCI, hospitals are contacted by the zone master to determine how much of what they can handle. Having one person controlling patient destination helps keep everything more organized.
From listening to the radio, it sounded fairly well run. I can’t be for certain as I wasn’t there. I know I got excited when I heard on our radio that two of our ambulances were headed emergent to DIA. I immediately thought there must have been an airplane wreck. I was disappointed I didn’t get to go, but it sounds like I didn’t really miss much.
Well, hopefully that is the quota for airplane catastrophies for DIA for a while.