Posted: 8/8/07
In the right place, at the right time
Area EMS crew assists with bridge disaster
 Tony Webster, an environmental science major at the U of M, was on his way home from his job with the city of Minneapolis when he heard from his sister that the bridge had collapsed. He was at the scene within 10 minutes. He is also a registered EMT and offered his services, too. Many of his photos were taken from the U of M pedestrian bridge, #9 and some from a platform near the 10th Street bridge. The Lakes Region EMS ambulance is seen in the photo below. |
By Patrick Tepoorten
A disaster occurs in the heart of Minneapolis. What are the odds that an ambulance from North Branch, over 50 miles away, would be one of the first on the scene? In the case of the I-35W bridge collapse, that is exactly what happened.
Lakes Region EMS paramedic Lori Dixon, and EMT Thea Polzin were two of three Lakes Region EMT employees that were pressed into service on the evening of Wednesday, Aug. 1. The third, Supervisor Ben Wasmund, in a Tuesday interview, explained how it was that Lakes Region played a crucial role in managing the disaster.
Dixon and Polzin were on their way back to North Branch after dropping a patient off at the University of Minnesota hospital.
They had just crossed the I-35W bridge heading north, and were thinking about getting a bite to eat when the call came in for emergency vehicles to report to the bridge site. Not knowing the area, the two first responders followed a Minneapolis fire truck and ended up on the northeast side of the bridge. They were the only ambulance on site.
"They were it," said Wasmund.
Together with members of the Minneapolis Fire Department, Minneapolis Police, and a doctor from Hennepin County Medical Center, they attended to the injured on the scene, while awaiting more units.
But those units would be a long time in coming because of the destruction and the difficulty finding ways around it. At one point, according to Wasmund, Polzin and Dixon decided they had to get two critical patients in their care to the hospital immediately. Not familiar with routes, a Minneapolis firefighter was put into service driving the ambulance.
When they arrived back at the scene, they were still the only ambulance crew on the northeast side of the bridge, and would transfer two more critical patients and another with non life-threatening injuries.
Wasmund said they were dispatched from the scene rather quickly, as the disaster scene changed from a rescue operation to a recovery operation. He estimated that Polzin and Dixon were back in North Branch between 7:30 and 8:30 p.m.
At press time, Lakes Region was unaware who was transported or the condition of those patients.
While the two local EMTs were already wrapping up their service, Wasmund was just getting started.
He was heading home to Hudson, and was just south of Forest Lake when he started to hear chatter on the state emergency band. He was startled to hear a call for five ambulances to report to the scene, and unusually high number.
Still unaware of what had occurred, Wasmund called a friend and asked him to check the news. That was when he learned the scope of the disaster and immediately headed south on 35W toward the scene.
The last few miles of his journey was behind a state trooper, and Wasmund ended up on the north side of the bridge, just a couple hundred feet from the collapsed structure.
"When I first pulled up I saw the smoke and it just added more to the chaos," said Wasmund, who initially ended up on the northwest side of the collapse. He described the scene as four different disaster areas, northeast, northwest, southeast, and southwest, all of which were essentially isolated from each other. For instance, though one of his crews was less than a quarter of a mile from his position, he was unaware they were on scene until he heard their call number on the radio.
Wasmund was placed in control of an ambulance staging area on the north side of the bridge. As ambulances were needed to respond to a triage area nearer the collapse site, it was Wasmund's duty to coordinate that response. He continued to serve in that capacity until rescue workers were sure that the vast majority of patients had been transported. He estimated that he left the scene around 10:30 p.m.
It was only then he was able to tune in to news coverage and see the full scope of the collapse. "It was very, very, surreal seeing that" he said.
In retrospect, Wasmund is amazed at how well the rescue operation went. "It went unbelievably well," he said. "Had it been on a much larger scale, responders were in a very good position, very early on, to respond to that."
Wasmund credits, in part, improved state-wide communications systems put in place in the wake of the 9/11 attacks for getting the right people to the right places.
Aside from first responders, Wasmund was amazed at the civilian response as well. "People just started coming. There was another citizen almost every five minutes, nurses, EMTs, nursing students, saying ‘what can we do?''
He recalled a cable television installer who drove his van to the scene and offered the use of climbing equipment, and another citizen who pulled up, opened his car doors, and unloaded cases upon cases of water, Gatorade, and ice. He said Rainbow Foods had simply opened its doors to him and told him to take what he needed. The citizen left his card, and said he was going back for more.
"There were so many people, more than we could use, and that's not a bad thing to have," said Wasmund.
Days after the tragedy, Wasmund has had time to reflect and was impressed with what he saw of the response. "Everyone did what they needed to do," he said. "They did a fantastic job."
Comment from Sue Anderson, 8/13/07
High interest story with an uplifting message
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