By Bill Myers and Ben Giles
The Washington Examiner
WASHINGTON — James Augustine, who was brought in to rescue the District’s beleaguered ambulance service, will resign at the end of the year, authorities announced Tuesday.
Augustine came aboard as the director of D.C.'s Emergency Medical Services in July 2008 but will be gone by year’s end, fire officials said in a news release. Officials cited “health and wellness” for his departure.
Fire Chief Dennis Rubin now finds himself searching for his third top medical official in less than two years. Rubin said in a news release Tuesday that Augustine had helped make the paramedics service “world class,” but Councilman Phil Mendelson, D-at large, who supervises the fire and ambulance agency, said Augustine’s rapid departure “means trouble.”
“It says that the EMS function in the department is in disarray,” Mendelson said. “It belies all the promises we’ve heard from the chief and the mayor in turning EMS around.”
Washingtonians were horrified in early 2006 when the mugging of retired journalist David Rosenbaum exposed rampant incompetence among its ambulance teams. Rosenbaum was taking a walk to enjoy unseasonably warm January weather when he was struck on the back of the head by two muggers. Fire officials who responded to the call initially didn’t check his vital signs, assuming that he was drunk. The paramedics who eventually came to collect him then drove him all the way across the city, rather than to a closer hospital, so that one of them could run a personal errand.
He died of his injuries while waiting for a doctor. His family sued the city for millions but agreed to settle in exchange for a massive overhaul of the city’s rescue service.
Mendelson sat on the post-settlement task force. He said Tuesday that he doubted whether Rubin or Mayor Adrian Fenty “take EMS seriously.”
Rubin’s spokesman, Pete Piringer, bristled at Mendelson’s suggestion that Augustine was forced out.
“Any insinuation or even allegation that he’s being forced out is completely false,” he said.
Authorities will appoint an interim director in the meantime and will open a formal search for a new director in January.
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