First responders: Accident was the worst By JONNA SPELBRING PRIESTER
May 14, 1988. One school bus. One pick-up truck. Fifty-six emergency medical technicians. Two paramedics. Two doctors. Two nurses. Ten ambulances, two helicopters, at least two fire trucks, at least one brush truck and a 1,500-gallon tanker truck. Multiple fire, rescue and Emergency Medical Service departments. As many as 60 people injured or dead, most of them children. The numbers were staggering; the scene was beyond comprehension. One volunteer firefighter and EMT from Campbellsburg was first on the scene, along with a Kentucky State Police trooper with, according to one witness, barely one week on the job. “The trooper, bless his heart, had been on the job a week, called post and said they’d ‘better call the National Guard, Campbellsburg can’t take care of this one,’” said Bob Burnett, a Henry County EMT who at the time was director of Henry County EMS District No. 1. Burnett was a member of the first EMS crew to respond to the accident. In a recent interview, he recalled that the scene he came upon that night was unlike anything he’s ever witnessed – before or since. “When I drove up, I looked through that windshield. ... I’ll never forget it,” he said, recalling the image of the church bus, which had burst into flames after impact. Burnett, a veteran emergency medical technician at the time of the Carrollton bus crash, recalls that he had gone out to eat in La Grange. Later, he had sat on his back porch and enjoyed a bowl of ice cream before going to bed. At 11 p.m., he got the call. It wasn’t abnormal, he said, for an accident to happen on the hill that rounds to the southwest coming out of Carrollton; there were one to two “rear enders” each year. Burnett described a scene that looked “like the midway at the Kentucky State Fair on Saturday night.” A caravan of buses was halted in the southbound lanes of Interstate 71, all on their way back from Kings Island. Chaperones and children from other buses were all around, some helping those from Radcliffe, who were riding the bus involved in the crash. The scene encompassed an area the length of three school buses, Burnett recalled; it was divided so that certain crews were working the north end and others working the south end. Burnett said that by all legal considerations, Carroll County should have handled the scene, and would have handled the triage care. “A fella (from Carroll County) said, ‘Bob, you handle it,’” Burnett said. “I said, ‘It’s your county. He said, ‘You’re doing an outstanding job.’” In triage, Burnett said victims were categorized into four groups. The first, the top priority, were seriously injured but alive. Seven victims were given that ranking that night, including Larry Mahoney, the driver of the pickup truck who caused the accident. The second category included those victims with non-life-threatening injuries; the third category included the “walking wounded.” The fourth, Burnett said, were those who were “obviously gone.” Burnett said he’d had Mahoney flown by helicopter to a Louisville hospital. Later, he said, some parents were incensed that he’d done that. “EMS doesn’t judge people. We treat the worst-injured first,” he said. “He was a priority one, so I flew him. “We let the law and the Lord figure it out [from there]. The Lord decides who is going to live or die, and the law decides who’s guilty or not. I just deal with sick and injured people.” EMS was successful that night, Burnett said, because all victims were at the hospital within the “golden hour” – the amount of time following an accident when medical treatment is the most critical to survival. Over the years, Burnett has taught EMS classes throughout the North-Central Kentucky region. Inevitably, discussion turns to the Carrollton bus crash. “I’ve been asked a lot in the last 20 years … how I slept at night,” he said. “I sleep well. I give 110 percent. When I lay down, I can actually know that I did everything I could to save one. It’s up to the Lord whether they live or not.” He’s still an active EMT in Henry County, having served since the 1970s. It’s a family affair, with a son and his wife who also volunteer as EMTs. Knowing you help people, he said, is one reason people volunteer for the job. Some volunteer EMTs left the service after the Carrollton incident, but most, like Burnett, stayed on. Chuck Smith, a volunteer EMT until the early 1990s, said the scene had a significant impact on a lot of the people who worked it, including himself. “One moment you’re having fun at Kings Island, and an hour later, you’re in this horrid crash,” he said, thinking about how events transpired that night for the victims. “It just makes you think about your own kids and what could happen.” Burnett said the 1988 tragedy helped bring about some changes in the way EMS teams respond to large-scale accident scenes in the region. After the scene was cleared, some EMTs stayed to clean up the scene, but also to talk. “We picked up all of the trash ... (then) sat on the guardrail,” Burnett said. “We sat and talked about it a little bit, and we went on our merry way.” Though some debriefing was available at the time, today Critical Instance Stress Debriefing Teams are involved when such accidents occur to help EMTs talk through the experience and help them deal with what they’ve seen. A debriefing team can include as few as three people or as many as 50, depending on the need, Burnett said. “We [local EMS agencies] coordinate that out of the [American Red Cross] office in Louisville,” he said. Another significant change is how information is disseminated to the press. “Now, we have an information officer ... we’d never done that before,” he said. “We didn’t handle that well [in 1988]. We learned from that.”
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