Avianca Crash

......so I'm back..The next WINS update came through and they said the same thing except this time they were a bit more specific and said a plane might have crashed into the Sound off the north shore of Nassau County. They stayed with the story and were updating new facts as they came in and making up quick facts to try and fill airtime with live reporting.I picked up my cell phone and called Mike at the VAC base. He was a good guy, a bit green for his days, but a decent Captain for me to interact with. I asked him what type of crews we had at the station at that time. He reported that we had the normal crew stationed there (which meant a driver, truck offiicer, an EMT, and an AMT (EMT - Emergency Medical Technician - AMT - Advanced Emergency Medical Technician. The difference between the two was the ability to give IV's, medications, and internal airways to patients.)I told him about the reports I was hearing on the radio and asked him to tune in to NEWS12, the local cable TV station. By doing so, he'd get more reports and quicker updates when they had information. At this point it didn't look like anything we'd be involved in, but I got a notion and hung in there with it. (Supplying emergency medicine and practiciing it, were our goals at all times.)(A bit of history about this VAC. On all of Long Island, we were the shit. We pushed and prodded our people to accel and train to the highest standards. We trained, and then trained some more. If you were on duty call, you were training. We enjoyed training. It beat watching endless TV and kept us fresh and focused. Never did a bus (ambulance) roll out of that headquarters without every single person on board being at least an EMT. (I wish today, 16 years later, this could be said about our ever increasingly trained and operated volunteer (for the most part) emergency services. Unfortunately, I think volunteer emergency medicine in this country peaked in the late 80's, and any interest therein has wained since.) We typically had 2 full crews of 4 people available at all times in order to roll simultaneous calls, should they come in. Our response times were the gold standard, typically out within 70-90 seconds of the call coming in. Most departments don't have a chief rolling that fast let alone a fully stocked and equiped ALS - Advanced Life Support - ambulance with a crew of 4.)The next WINS radio report came in about 30 seconds later and reported that, in fact, a plane had crashed in tawny Oyster Bay, NY. They reported that it went down into the Sound and the Coast Guard was being dispatched. That's all I needed to hear to start the ball rolling for us.I got back on the phone to Mike. I told him to start making phone calls, quietly, - no radios (which would garner interest to the scanner listening community (read "other departments") - to get crews together and have them high tail it, quietly again, to headquarters. I didn't want this going 'official' yet because if there was indeed a crash going on the dispatch center would have their hands full and the last thing they needed was hollow promises or another department junkie bugging them for 'inside details' for vicarious enjoyment, or un-needed radio communications to listen to.At this point, being in my chiefs car, I turned on my emergency lights and started heading to our base. I was probably 8 minutes out at that time and pushing my car to the edge. I knew we had the people around and they'd be assembling quickly, but I didn't want anything but firm information being sent to the dispatch center, so when warm bodies were there, we'd take a head count and let dispatch know the firm numbers.God bless his soul, Mike's fingers were speed dialing. In 3 minutes he had put together a team of 24 and had three ambulances out of the heated bays and warming up on the line (driveway apron). He told me he'd detailed all available members to start putting any supplies and materials they could get their hands on into each ambulance. At that point, impressed, I told him to do 2 things 1- get things 'official' by calling the other 2 chiefs and get them up to speed on what was going on; and 2 - get on the horn with dispatch and tell them what in-hand assets we had to give them.3 minutes out.Mike calls me on the radio. (this meant we were official and were issued a call number for our records just in case. He also said our friend in dispatch put him on hold and was walking over to the supervisory dispatch console to ask directly if our assets were needed.) He also said that in the interim he had found 1 other chief who had arrived ahead of me because he was passing by and saw all the commotion at our base. The other chief had relieved Mike's in-house command. I thought to myself that I needed to put a request in for a citatation for Mike. He'd done a great job.My car is screaming. It wants to pull apart at the seams. Tires screetching, engine smoking, it was a balls to the wall response for me.1 minute out...Ahead I see two ambulances coming at me..... Hmm, I wonder who they are?... huh?.... they're mine. what the f....? I didn't hear any radio transmission to dispatch these ambulances. Then my radio blares off. Dispatch was giving us the call and sending us with an unheard of 3 out of 3 ambulances to this plane crash. This was something for us. We were located as close to the opposite side of the county as you could get from the crash site, yet we were in the first 10 departments dispatched to the scene. (typically 1 ambulance will stay in our district back to handle local emergencies. It finally got through to them, dispatch, (a county run main brain emergency call center who serviced all departments in the county) that our district was covered, re-covered, and covered again. (Politics - Our district covered 125K people in 5 fire districts. Each of those fire districts had three of their own department ambulances in each fire house. Then on top of that the police had their own ambulance service with 2 ambulances covering the north side of 'our' district and 2 covering the south side. With our three ambulances, our physcial district had a whopping 22 ambulances covering about 40 square miles. Overkill of the over-killed. Well, that's for a later discussion.)I arrived at our base to find a single ambulance left with a crew of 8 inside along with my other assistant chief waiting in his vehicle. I hopped into the ambulance, then hopped out because I seemed to be the only one who knew where in gods name Oyster Bay Cove (this is a Google Earth Satellite image of the area. You need to install their free service to view the link properly) is. (The location had been updated by dispatch and became much more specific.)We were off.25 minutes later we're careening through the town of Oyster Bay, make a right onto the local access road heading east. Then we come in contact with a line of traffic blocking the sides of the road. Some of these cars had blue lights that were left flashing (firemen), some other cars, porche's and jaguar types were obviously thrill seeker voyeurs. All these vehicles were blocking our box type ambulances from getting through to the scene of the crash. The other asst chief and myself stopped there, loaded as much equipment and personnel as we could into our chevy caprice and drove in another mile before we had to stop for someplace to park without our vehicle becoming part of the access problem as well. The plane had crashed on a tertiary road, (another Google Earth link) we were currently on a secondary access road leading to the still smaller tertiary road. The secondary road was a very tight, one lane each direction, road. On one side was the long island sound with no shoulder except for cat tails and murky wetlands, the other side was an earthen berm which sat about 4 feet off the in-bound travel lane and mounded 3 feet high. We nosed hard in to the berm (and wondered whether we'd get the car off it when everything was done.) We unloaded personnel and medical supplies and started walking. We needed to walk another 1/2 mile to the crash site.We rounded the corner from the secondary road to the tertiary and there, about 100 feet in, was a huge NEWS12 satellite uplink truck (the size of a 1/2 semi) in the MIDDLE OF THE ROAD, UNATTENDED!!!! 2 heavy rescue fire trucks were stuck behind this things trying to get passed. They couldn't enter the crash site because of this flippin news truck. That's the day I lost all respect for NEWS12 (and they won an award for their coverage, go figure.) It was a short uphill hike to the crash scene. I'll never forget this. Firemen all over the place walking around setting up lights, running here and there. The lights were up and glaring off this white and red aircraft fuselage. The tail had broken away, with a section of about 30 windows worth of the main cabin sitting at a 35 degree angle going up hill perpendicular to the road. It litterally took my breath away. It also caused my mind to reboot. I guess I couldn't, for a split second, process the fact that there was a plane in the dirt across a road and in pieces sitting in front of me. Planes were supposed to be neatly sitting on tarmacks.We had to stop. On our left was John MacEnroe's parents house. They had a somewhat hidden lawn with a split rail fence around it. This isn't a typical country street. This was rustic. The driveways were paved, but they were certainly overgrown with thickets, oaks, scrub brush, some drainage gulleys down the sides and heavy woods surrounding everything else. Continuing to the left (North) but a bit ahead, my eyes adjusted to the combination of night time and the eery emergency work lights. I saw...trees. But they weren't full trees. They were stubs of their former selves. Like telephone poles in the making that were just stuck into the ground and had no foliage or tops. A swath of destruction had been cut into the woods starting from the north into where I was standing. You could see some very tippy branches had been removed from trees far away, then the devestation had continued but more intensely and angling lower the closer they were to me.The area didn't smell. I had always thought the smell of kerosene would be most prevalent, and there'd be fire all about if there was ever a plane crash. In this case, there were small fires, but no smell. These fires were being put out with hand extinguishers and some hand lines.I saw that Mr MacEnroe (senior) and his wife were standing outside their house and were upset that people were walking about their property. They were, in my eyes, in shock (along with everyone else) and were tring to process getting back to normalcy in this very out of the norm night. I was then tugged by a fire chief. He identified himself as commanding officer of the firefighting side of things and that medical needed help up the driveway/hill to my right.We turned and headed up a driveway leading south. As we made our way up, I found we were heading toward the aircraft and up to where the cockpit should have been (but now wasn't). We entered this homes rear yard/parking area and found the medical coordinator. He was...almost helpless and pulling his hair out..... I noticed that a few large tarps had been setup on the ground to begin the makings of a triage classification area.(Triage allows rescuers the ability to categorize the injured into various stages of medical need. Typically they are: Black (the Dead) no transport needed; The lowest priority - Green (slow if any transport to the hospital); The next higher priority - Amber (moderate transport needs 20 - 40 minutes); and Red (immediate transport/attention needed). (Depending on the incident, these categories are increased or decreased as needed, sometimes with sub-categories). Two of my team peeled off at this point and went towards triage. I was grabbed by the arm (due to my 'advanced' patch on my sleeve) and told that I was now in charge of the main fuselage (top) (I'm in the orange jacket, right side) and expect to receive patients immediately. (Where we had come from, down the driveway and lower on the hill, was next to the fuselage bottom) The seats inside the plane were facing up the hill...)I was immediately lead away by the arm and named 'doc' by my 'guide'. In the next 2 hours I heard 'doc' called more times than I ever want to hear again. "Doc, they need you inside the plane down 12 rows"; "Doc, there's a lady stuck in the crotch of this tree 12 feet off the ground"; "Doc, they just made it into the cockpit and need you"; "Doc, we found 10, no 13 kids, they need to be triaged"; "Doc, this guys alive what do we do with him"; "Doc, what's wrong with this guy, his arm is doing funny things"; Doc, we've got too many bodies and not enough backboards, what do we do with them, they're in the way"; "Doc", "Doc", "Doc"...(mind you, all of these statements hit me in the first 3 minutes of my tasking and arrival in 'my' command sector. I had a partner with me, (also in orange and to my left) but he was looking mighty confused and then his eyes sorta glazed over and he peeled away and went to meet the others near triage, I lost sight and knowledge of the others in my group for the next 1 hour..........