EMT President seeks change

Patrick Moore of Conway, president of the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians, stands in front of The Church Alive before a memorial service earlier this month. He holds one of the U.S. flags to present to families of three people killed in an Air Evac helicopter crash on Aug. 31.
Patrick Moore of Conway, president of the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians, stands in front of The Church Alive before a memorial service earlier this month. He holds one of the U.S. flags to present to families of three people killed in an Air Evac helicopter crash on Aug. 31.

— Patrick Moore of Conway, president of the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians, gets a text message or e-mail every time a medical helicopter crashes in the United States.

He hates to get any of them, but the text message he received Aug. 31 was different.

“Since it came out of Vilonia, I knew that we probably at least knew some of the crew,” he said. “It makes you shudder.”

The Vilonia Air Evac Lifeteam crew crashed in the Walnut Grove community en route to pick up a wreck victim in another town. Killed were pilot Kenneth “Kenny” Robertson of Searcy, flight nurse Kenneth “Ken” Meyer Jr. of Center Ridge and paramedic Gayla Gregory of Clarksville.

Moore, who has been an EMT for 38 years, knew Robertson and Meyer. Moore’s wife, Leslie, a paramedic, knew all three.

Mingling with Moore’s feelings of sadness was frustration.

“When it crashed, I thought, damn, you know,” Moore recalled.

The National Transportation Safety Board started calling for stricter safety standards on air medical transportation, but it’s a familiar cry.

Moore appointed a task force last year that brought up the same concerns.

The national EMT organization drafted a position statement on medical-helicopter safety that was presented in February 2009 at the NTSB hearings in Washington, which Moore attended.

The statement expressed that the organization “is very concerned with the alarming and increasing rate of accidents, injuries and deaths” occurring in the air medical-transportation industry.

According to the statement, the organization “strongly supports the development and enforcement of evidence-based, mission-appropriate safety standards that enhance the safety of both patients and crew members.”

“The federal government should bring together all stakeholder groups to reach a consensus on these standards and incorporate them into federal regulation,” the statement continued.

Agencies and organizations have issued reports since 2000, the position statement maintained; “however, no solutions have been implemented to date by either the federal government or the industry.”

“I know that a lot of people involved at that level feel frustration because of the bureaucracy that everybody has to go through in Washington,” Moore said earlier this month. “Nothing gets [done] in a hurry. How many crashes does it take?”

According to NTSB, from February 2008 through July 2010, there were 28 crashes, resulting in 54 fatalities and nine serious injuries.

The three people who died with Vilonia Air Evac aren’t included in those statistics.

Keith Holloway, NTSB public affairs officer, also attended the hearings last year.

Holloway said the NTSB has a “most wanted list,” which are the four priorities for safety improvements “that we feel have not been responded to” by the Federal Aviation Administration:

• Conduct all flights with medical personnel on board in accordance with stricter commuter aircraft regulations.

• Develop and implement flight-risk evaluation programs for EMS operators.

• Require formalized dispatch and flight-following procedures, including up-to-date weather information.

• Install terrain awareness and warning systems on aircraft used for EMS operations.

“We don’t know what the cause of that [Vilonia] accident was, so we really can’t say if that would apply,” Holloway said, “but in past accidents these are the issues we’ve seen.”

The NTSB is investigating the Air Evac crash, but there was no distress call, and debris was scattered for hundreds of yards, according to newspaper reports. The helicopter broke apart while in flight, according to a preliminary report.

Moore said, “We heard pretty quickly that the debris field was pretty large. We never thought that it crashed into the ground and killed everybody, because the debris field was so large that that was a good indication that something happened while it was in flight.”

What’s clear is, “We’re killing our providers and sometimes patients,” he said.

“The inherent part of being in a helicopter crash is — most of the time — it’s unforgiving, unlike a ground ambulance that’s built around a chassis built by the motor-vehicle industry to sustain crashes and protect the occupants.

“Even though it was an early-morning mission to a motor-vehicle accident, it could have just as easily failed on a hospital-to-hospital transfer of a patient.”

“It was probably just going to happen, and who knows if it could have been prevented?” Moore said.

“You hate it that it happened, but it does bring back to reality the dangers of providing EMS care through this mode of delivery.”

At a memorial service Aug. 31 at The Church Alive in Conway, Moore presented the families of all three victims with U.S. flags.

“It wasn’t the first time I’ve ever done it,” Moore said. “Since we are a national organization, we kind of represent the EMS provider on the national level. Those flags I presented to them were actually flown over the U.S. Capitol and overnighted to me. It’s done as a gesture of honor of service those people provided.”

Bending on one knee in front of each family, Moore tried to offer words of comfort.

“I tell them on behalf of a grateful nation, their loved ones served with honor and integrity,” he said, “and as a symbol of that, this flag is only a token of that service they provided, and that we in the profession appreciate their sharing their loved ones with us.”

Moore said family members usually tell him the person “died doing what he loved to do, and they always thank me. It’s a very personal thing.”

As the longtime Faulkner County coroner, Moore sees death on a regular basis, but he wonders how many of his fellow emergency-service providers could be saved by tougher safety standards.

“I guess I’m kind of frustrated because — I don’t know how to put [it] into words — what can we do?” he said. “Is there somebody out there who can make a difference? Obviously, Pat Moore can’t, and the national association of EMTs can’t, but we have come together to say something needs to be done.”

For now, presenting the flags and whispering condolences to the survivors is all he can do.

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