Jumpline magazine Q1 2023 - Flipbook - Page 47
Dave Downey, Ret.
I was There when it Happened Continued
rescue working a traumatic arrest.
There were people everywhere and
as I approached the front door, all
the lights were shot out. With our
flashlights, all we could see were
people laying everywhere. I
realized we had an MCI (although we had no MCI plan),
got on the radio, established
command and requested a
suppression for the LZ, a
battalion, and 6 rescues. I directed my crew and the crew
of Rescue 11 to start removing
everyone onto the front sidewalk
where we could better see their injuries and start treatment. Apparently, some of the victims were thrown into
cars and transported to the 2 closest hospitals,
Parkway (now Jackson North) and Golden Glades (now
closed). I was notified over the air that these facilities had
GSW victims and were requesting rescues. Two of the 6
rescues I requested were diverted to each facility.
As units arrived and the battalion arrived (I think Battalion 2)
things began to stabilize. We ended up sending 6 stable patients to Hollywood Memorial (now Memorial Regional) and
the rest to Jackson via ground. Air Rescue took only one
patient, the traumatic arrest R-38 handled.
There were no triage tags, no coordination, and no plan.
Fortunately for me, just a couple of months earlier, my wife
Julie, then a lieutenant with the City of Sunrise Fire Rescue
was on light duty, pregnant with our 2nd daughter, and was
working on a Mass Casualty Plan. When we had initially talked about it, I casually listened but never took a real interest
until after the nightclub shooting. A couple of shifts after
the shooting the Division called for an after-action
meeting at Station 11. I thought this would be a
great opportunity to introduce my wife’s work
(I gave her the credit). The meeting was a
bit tense as everyone postured and was
on the defensive. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t a good time to drop my plan
on them, but I did anyway. It wasn’t accepted well by the chiefs that felt this
call should have been run like a fire,
with sectors. They didn’t see a need for
an EMS-type command. Nine days after
the shooting, on the morning of August
24, 1992, Hurricane Andrew struck, and
the Taste of the Islands massacre became
a distant memory.
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supporter was Tom Quinn, who worked as an EMS Captain.
Tom was critical in helping me navigate my plan. Instead of
creating a policy, we decided to put the MCI Plan in the MOM
as this document was “controlled” by the EMS Division. It
was Tom and I who came up with the idea of the MCI Levels
1, 2, and 3. We modeled it after our standard house, building, high rise assignments. The plan that my wife developed
back in 1992, with a bit of refinement by me, became our
plan and later was adopted as the State of Florida Mass Casualty Plan.
Service Delivery, Modified Dispatch
In the mid-90’s the local and the department created a Service Delivery Committee, and I was asked to participate. The
foundation of the committee was to help develop the plan
that would become the basis for a General Obligation Bond
to build additional stations, a headquarters, and a training
center. The bond passed in 1994.
As we were evaluating everything from station location to
call volume, one thing that caught my eye was the call volume, especially those of the rescues. It didn’t come as that
big of a surprise to me as I spent my entire time as a bidin firefighter on Rescue 11. It was before the opening of
Stations 44, 51, and 54 that rescues were running most of
the calls. Rescue 2 was always one of the busiest rescues
in the nation as listed in Firehouse Magazine’s Annual Run
Survey and having worked Rescue 29 as a rookie, I never
forgot how busy that unit was. When I looked at the stats,
the problem was glaring. At the time, we probably had 39
stations and were running something like 120,000 calls per
year, BUT the 10 busiest rescues ran 50%, yes, HALF of all
the calls in the Department. That was way out of whack!
At the same time, Chief Drew Keyes in Communications was
working on purchasing a new system called Medical Priority
Dispatch. This system, developed in Salt Lake City, was designed to provide for “pre-arrival” instructions such
as how to do CPR, and prioritize calls based
on a nationally accepted algorithm. I met
with Chief Keyes and tried to learn everything I could about MPDS. This was
pre-Google, so it took a bit longer.
One of the things I realized was
that this initiative was in its infancy,
and we need to do something now.
=In early 1993 I was asked to come into the
EMS Office to fill a recently created position
of EMS R&D Lieutenant. I accepted and
spent the next couple of months
working on developing the
MCI Plan. My number one
February 2023 | JUMPLINE Magazine
Captain Ronald “Duke” Adkinson
was a well-respected “rescue guy,”
having spent years on Rescue 2
and now working in the EMS Division. He and I began working on
what we called a “Modified Dispatch”
plan. The idea was to try and determine, if
solely based on reference, could we determine
that the call could be handled by a BLS suppression unit? We had to develop this plan
based on what we thought would
work, as there was no way to
study the issue beforehand.