The Buffalo News
GENESEE COUNTY, N.Y. — Around 12:20 p.m. Friday, Scott Wooton sat in a meeting with other Mercy Flight leaders to conduct a policy review.
All of a sudden, their phones lit up. A tour bus had rolled over on the Thruway in Genesee County. Wooton and other administrators hoped it wouldn’t be that bad, wanting to believe that perhaps the bus wasn’t moving at a high rate of speed or that everyone inside was buckled up.
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Five people were killed Friday when a tour bus carrying 54 people lost control in the eastbound lanes of the Thruway just before exit 48A near Pembroke in Genesee County .
But then they heard there was at least one passenger ejection from the bus. Wooton and Mercy Flight’s leadership called the organization’s communications center, where four dispatchers were scrambling to answer a flood of calls. The dispatchers informed their bosses: This was a serious crash, and it looked to be a mass casualty incident.
“As soon as we heard what was going on, we auto-launched all three of our helicopters and crews and just started sending every available ground ambulance unit to the scene, as well,” said Wooton, Mercy Flight’s executive vice president.
By Friday evening, the Western New York community learned that five adults aboard the bus had died at the scene. Dozens of people from the bus, which state police said was carrying 54 people, sustained injuries and were transported to hospitals by Mercy Flight and other emergency responders.
All told, Wooton said Mercy Flight ended up sending 16 different ground ambulance units, staffed by 30 to 40 employees, to the scene. In addition, all three of its helicopters, each staffed by a crew of three people, transported patients from the scene Friday. And Mercy Flight also called in another dozen people to staff up its fourth helicopter, a spare, in case it was needed at the scene or somewhere else in Western New York if another incident occurred.
For Wooton, who has been with Mercy Flight since 2008, he has never seen an emergency response like what unfolded Friday.
“It was just a real hellish scene,” Wooton said. “One of our flight medics described it like it was a scene out of a movie, a traumatic scene out of a movie. There were multiple ejections, people under the bus, and it was just everybody really working together as a team to try to start helping the most seriously injured.”
Mercy Flight President Margaret A. Ferrentino said she had last seen an incident like this in 1994 when she was the general manager at LaSalle Ambulance. That day in August 1994, an Amtrak train derailed in the predawn darkness just west of Batavia, sending cars plunging down an embankment and injuring more than 100 passengers. LaSalle and Mercy Flight were part of the multi-agency response that day 31 years ago.
Of the dozens who were taken Friday to Erie County Medical Center, Kaleida Health’s hospitals, Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester and United Memorial Medical Center in Batavia, most were in stable or good condition as of Saturday morning.
One patient was in serious condition at Oishei Children’s Hospital as of Saturday morning. University of Rochester Medical Center, which operates Strong Memorial, had two patients with critical injuries as of 5 p.m. Friday , but it did not immediately provide updates as of Saturday.
Wooton said Mercy Flight’s three helicopters and all of its available ambulances headed to the scene just after 12:30 p.m. Friday. As things developed, Wooton, Ferrentino and the organization’s director of medical operations headed up to the communications center.
There, the administrators helped where they could as they watched the communications team handle “phones just ringing off the hook,” dispatch units and pre-notify hospitals of incoming patients.
“They’re kind of the heroes behind the heroes,” Wooton said of the dispatchers.
Where the crash happened put Western New York’s emergency resources on full display. Nearly halfway between Buffalo and Rochester , Mercy Flight , as well as Mercy Flight Central in Canandaigua , responded with air ambulances. Most of Mercy Flight’s ground ambulances were just a few miles away in Batavia . Meanwhile, patients were able to be sent to many different hospitals in Buffalo, Batavia and Rochester, which helped no one hospital get inundated with too many patients at one time.
ECMC, which received the most patients with 21, had just held a mass casualty drill in July, where it prepared for a situation like what unfolded Friday, ECMC Chief Medical Officer Dr. Samuel D. Cloud said Friday afternoon.
“This is probably the most trauma patients we’ve had from one incident in my career here in Buffalo,” said Cloud, 25 years into his career.
The quality of the emergency response, Wooton said, made Friday “kind of as inspiring as it was tragic and traumatic.”
“When the worst things happen, you see the best side of humanity,” he said, “and that’s what happened yesterday.”
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