By Daniel Lopez and Jim Johnson
Monterey County Herald
MONTEREY COUNTY, Calif. — A deadly bus crash on Highway 101 this week is being called the worst tragedy in recent Monterey County history.
Emergency officials say they have never seen an event with the number and severity of the injuries.
“As a single incident, this was of shocking magnitude,” said Paul Ireland, the county’s emergency services manager.
Five people, including the driver, were killed and 31 people were injured after the charter bus carrying a group of French tourists and their guide slammed into an overpass guardrail and careened out of control near Soledad on Tuesday.
The number of casualties involved is believed to be the most in the county since a freight train slammed into a bus filled with Mexican field workers in 1963, killing 32 people and injuring 35.
Tom Lynch, the county’s Emergency Medical Services agency director, said the speed and efficiency with which emergency responders from a number of agencies arrived on the scene Tuesday was “impressive,” given the challenges of battling backed-up traffic on Highway 101 the lone route in and out for ground units dealing with an elevated accident site on the overpass, and responding to an isolated location midway in the Salinas Valley.
“This was remarkable,” Lynch said Thursday while reviewing a pair of computer-aided dispatch reports from the incident, noting that the first responders were at the site within two minutes of being sent and the rest of the fire, police and ambulance responders who worked the scene were on their way within 10 minutes of the first call.
The CHP said it won’t release recordings of the 911 calls while it investigates, which could take several months for an accident reconstruction team to complete. A preliminary report could be released this week.
Investigators are withholding maintenance records for Weeks Enterprises Inc., the Orange County company that owns the Orion Pacific tour bus.
The company has declined to comment during the investigation.
According to a re-creation of the incident based on CAD reports, dispatchers issued an initial call for service at 3:23 p.m. to the Soledad Fire Department.
Based on a 911 caller’s description of the scene, dispatchers reported a tour bus on its side on the Highway 101 overpass and that two ground ambulances were sent to the scene.
A minute later, dispatchers reported the possibility of mass casualties, with injured passengers on the ground outside the bus, which was leaking gas, and other people who had fallen off the overpass onto railroad tracks.
By 3:25 p.m., Soledad Fire Chief Rich Foster and a fire engine with a crew of four had arrived at the scene, followed by a pair of American Medical Response ambulances already in Soledad.
Recalling the scene Thursday, Foster said, four people were on the ground below the overpass and above two girls were looking down.
“They were calling out, ‘Mama, mama,’” Foster said. “They were the daughters of one of the women down below and that was pretty striking.”
Bus driver John Egnew, 69, of Corona, and passengers Daniel Le Garrec, 68, and Jacqueline Montmayeur, 64, died at the scene. Montmayeur’s husband Christian, 65, and Michael Taveria, 26, died in hospitals.
The names of the other passengers have not been released.
Foster said two members of his crew stayed with the people on the ground, while he and the other two firefighters went to the bus.
“A lot of people were walking around, there were walking wounded,” he said. “Some were over next to the guardrail, others by the bus. I didn’t have time to think how many were dead.”
Request for aid
At 3:28 p.m., a California Highway Patrol unit arrived at the crash site and shut down the overpass. Dispatchers issued a call for multiple air ambulances, and began discussing setting up a landing zone.
A moment later, Foster who had assumed the role of incident commander officially declared a multiple casualty incident and began asking for more aid.
Three more ground ambulances were dispatched and were en route to the scene.
“The first patient I approached was speaking to me but I didn’t understand what she was saying,” Foster said. “At first I thought she was speaking German, then someone said, ‘No, it’s French.’”
Foster said the badly injured woman was with her husband.
“In his eyes, he was looking for help,” Foster said. “Even though we couldn’t speak to them, it was evident they just wanted help.”
Helicopters on way
At 3:30 p.m., CalStar had four air ambulances in the air, en route from Gilroy, Salinas, Concord and Vacaville. Two Lifeflight helicopters and a Mediflight helicopter from Fresno were also on the way.
A couple of minutes later, county EMS sent its Disaster Medical Support Unit with crew, along with another EMS responder. By 3:33 p.m., 10 more fire agencies were on their way, including Cal Fire, Salinas City and Rural, Gonzales, Greenfield and King City from the Salinas Valley, Marina and Presidio of Monterey from the Peninsula, as well as Fort Hunter Liggett and the nearby Soledad state prisons. Monterey County Sheriff’s deputies and Soledad police also responded, and two CHP helicopters provided air support.
“Everybody got an assignment and we started a treatment area,” Foster said.
Firefighters and law enforcement were charged with helping move victims from the bus, conducting triage and basic treatment, and dealing with the gas leak, as well as setting up the landing zone for the air ambulances.
Anthony Prado, a Marina firefighter, was one of 59 people who responded to help the crash victims.
“A lot of them were covered in blood and it was hard to tell if it was their blood or someone else’s,” Prado said. “They were all marked as critical.”
Patients loaded
At 3:36 p.m., Foster reported that there were 36 people suffering from severe to moderate injuries, and by 3:50 p.m., 12 ground ambulances were committed to the accident.
“It was a load-and-go scenario,” Prado said of moving patient after patient to ambulances and helicopters.
With so many resources devoted to the crash, mutual aid had kicked in, with Carmel Fire dedicating two ambulance units to cover the Peninsula. Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties’ AMR units covered the northern parts of the county, with the latter responsible for providing access to transport for critical patients from area hospitals to San Jose-area trauma centers, and San Luis Ambulance moved to King City to cover the county’s southern end.
The county activated its Emergency Operations Center at the Health Department, and officials began monitoring the situation and organizing the local response from there.
By 5:54 p.m., all of the injured were transported from the scene, and the Multiple Casualty Incident was terminated moments later.
From first call to final transport, about 2½ hours elapsed.
“We had 20 patients with major injuries and that’s a lot to handle and sort out,” Foster said. “It’s chaotic and it’s difficult, but everybody is given an assignment and it worked.”
Toll on responders
Lynch said there have been a number of smaller multi-casualty incidents in recent county history involving up to 13 victims, but he said no one can remember dealing with “an incident of this magnitude with the number and severity of the injuries.”
Foster, a 36-year veteran of the fire service, said working such a devastating scene takes an emotional toll on the responders.
“The whole scene was pretty difficult for everybody,” he said. “I didn’t sleep the night of the accident.”
To help them cope with their emotions, the responders held a stress debriefing the next day.
“When you see that many people injured, the mind just isn’t trained to work with that,” Foster said. “Some of the day-to-day things we deal with just don’t seem quite as important when you go through something like that.”
Lynch said local officials are preparing for a post-incident review with Foster and EMS analyst Steve Brooks taking the lead roles. The review will include an assessment of the local emergency response’s successes and shortcomings, as well as development of an action plan to make improvements. Officials are planning to conduct it by May 7, Lynch said.
Communication breakdown
Lynch doesn’t think the local response could have been much better, although he noted that virtually every such report in the United States cites the relative lack of “inter-operability” between agencies via their radio systems. In other words, because some emergency responders use different radio systems, it is more difficult or impossible to communicate directly.
He said communications should improve locally with the planned implementation of a Next Generation narrowband radio system designed to connect nearly all emergency responders in the county.
Lynch said EMS is about to unveil a new Multiple Casualty Incident Plan that will include recommendations for additional medical management training for emergency responders.