By Schuyler Kropf
The Post and Courier
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Traveling 100 mph, 400 feet in the air — with flocks of geese flying nearby — it’s easy to see why working in a medical helicopter is one of the most dangerous jobs in America.
Yet even with all the hazards in the sky, work on the ground to save patients goes on.
Trident Medical Center on Wednesday unveiled a new helicopter landing pad on its North Charleston grounds that will cut as much as 15 minutes of time getting patients into the emergency room.
Previously, medical choppers that delivered patients to Trident had to land on a grassy field on the Charleston Southern University campus, across U.S. Highway 78. It was a cumbersome and time-consuming affair that required police officers to halt traffic on the busy highway to get a filled ambulance back across the road.
But now it’s a straight shot from helipad to hospital that can be measured in feet.
“Every minute that your heart is not getting oxygen, cells are dying,” Michael Shirey, EMS coordinator at Trident, said Wednesday.
The helipad, which went on line this week, largely will benefit residents of Berkeley, Dorchester and Colleton counties who come in suffering from heart attacks or strokes.
But while Trident is modernizing its patient-receiving ability, one constant is that the men and women who work in the medical helicopter field operate in one of the more increasingly risky professions in the country.
A report by The Washington Post last month said medical flight work is deadlier than a variety of other high-risk jobs, including logging, mining or even being a police officer. Since 1980, at least 211 crew members and 27 patients have died in such medical flights while many more were injured, according to the Post.
Perhaps South Carolina’s most visible accident was in July 2004 when a medical helicopter crashed in Newberry County killing four, three crew members and a patient. The chopper went down after leaving an accident on Interstate 26.
The trend has drawn significant attention and concern from officials in Washington, D.C., including the National Transportation Safety Board, which this week approved recommendations for better training and sophisticated safety equipment for emergency helicopter operators.
Among their proposals were requiring medical helicopter operators to install autopilot systems that can help solo pilots, terrain-awareness monitoring to help pilots navigate in bad conditions, night-vision systems that help navigate in the dark and flight data recorders.
During a press tour of the new pad Wednesday, a flight team from the Omniflight medical helicopter that lands at Trident took reporters for an aerial run of the new operation. The service is one of at least three emergency medical helicopter businesses operating in South Carolina.
Omniflight has three choppers on the coast, working out of Charleston, Conway and Savannah, that can serve a variety of patients and hospitals, depending on patient need. Their travel time is so quick that the chopper can leave its base in North Charleston and be on Kiawah Island in as few as eight minutes.
In the air, the chatter was all about safety and keeping landmarks in view. “You got the steeple?” a crewman asked in reference to the CSU campus. Cell towers, the tree line and even the busy traffic at nearby Charleston International Airport were other concerns.
Local crews declined to discuss the dangerous aspects of medical flights, partly out of concern of the recent attention the industry has drawn.
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