Reporter plays the part of victim

loading...

We landed in Bangor just after 8 a.m. Sunday, on a night-owl flight from Frankfurt, Germany. There were almost 300 passengers on the wide-body L-1011 jet, and we were dazed from lack of sleep and airline peanuts.

We were supposed to clear Customs, refuel and continue westward. Before the aircraft reached the terminal, however, it turned toward a remote part of the field.

A short time later, the captain’s voice filled the cabin. There was a problem, he said, and we should disembark as soon as possible. Passengers were beginning to file out of the doors when there was a deafening explosion.

The cabin filled with smoke, and it was impossible to see. People gasped for air.

There was a searing pain in my right forearm. I touched the sleeve with with my opposite hand, and it came away slippery with blood. A jagged piece of metal was lodged in the muscle. I began to hyperventilate.

Most of the aircraft windows had been blown out, and I peered through an opening at boiling clouds of smoke. Twenty feet away, three college students lay in a tangled heap on the runway. They weren’t moving.

Other passengers sat on the tarmac with their heads bowed. Some wandered aimlessly. A low moaning sound filled the air.

About 18 minutes after the explosion, the first police units arrived. A short time later, an ambulance rolled up to the scene. People ran toward it, begging for help.

The ambulance crew was overwhelmed. They called for assistance, but it was a long time before enough paramedics arrived.

Pain settled like a blanket over the victims. We prayed and swore, and no one came. We screamed and died, and no one came.

A lady writhed in a pool of blood on the cabin floor, her stomach sliced open. Sticky red goo covered the face of a man with a gaping head wound. My shirt and pants were stained with blood, and I watched numbly as it dripped onto my brand new shoes.

I called for someone to help, anyone to help. About 20 minutes after the explosion, a member of Bangor’s bomb disposal unit came into the cabin. He made a quick assessment of passengers and disappeared.

We cried and moaned and prayed some more.

Finally, several emergency medical personnel entered the cabin. I begged a paramedic for pain medicine, but his only response was, “Can you walk?” I could, so he sent me to “find the yellow circle.”

With wreckage and bodies strewn across the tarmac, I couldn’t find the right spot. I wandered off toward the nearest structure, an old bunker. There was no yellow circle there.

My eyelids and lips were turning blue, and I was getting weaker. Finally, a Bangor firefighter saw me and walked me to the triage site.

There was no yellow circle there, but several paramedics were assessing the wounded. They looked at my arm and saw my color. They gave me oxygen, started an intravenous line, and put me on an ambulance in the first wave of victims headed for Eastern Maine Medical Center.

The pain built during the ride, and I was begging for medicine when we got to the emergency room about an hour after the explosion. The staff made a quick check of my injuries, then sent me to a treatment room. There were sicker people on the way.

I arrived at the old firehouse at the airport just before 6 a.m. More than a hundred people were already there, waiting to be costumed for their roles as victims of an airplane bombing for a disaster drill at Bangor International Airport. Despite the hour and the grim scenario, they were a surprisingly cheery crowd.

Carole York, a registered nurse at St. Joseph Hospital in Bangor, wanted to look at trauma care from the patient’s point of view.

Celine Dube hoped to learn something that would improve her skills as a volunteer firefighter in Plymouth.

Jennie Bolstridge of Hartland was planning on a law enforcement career and wanted to experience the job firsthand.

Lynne Speed was even more sensible. “If there’s ever a real emergency, I want everyone prepared in case I’m involved,” she said.

Skin-tone putty and lifelike blood soon gave a nightmarish appearance to the group. One woman had a mock amputation of her arm, another a fake heart attack. Puncture wounds were common.

“I’ve done this for years,” said a smiling Nikki Higgins as she slathered people with gore. Higgins is the office manager at Together Place in Bangor and a former member of the Hermon ambulance crew.

“It’s very valuable,” she added. “If a plane crashed in Bangor, people would know what to do. But there’s always more to learn.”

I’m no expert, but the level of care seemed generally high. Response times reported above were adjusted to reflect that the exercise was suspended for about 20 minutes to treat people who were really, but inadvertently, overcome by smoke.

Some constructive criticisms, from a layman’s point of view:

Overall control of the site was lacking. Overworked ambulance crews were telling disoriented victims to find places that weren’t easily seen. Many people wandered aimlessly for a long time before getting help.

The triage process was fairly quick, but patients who were more vocal about their injuries, as I was, appeared to get treated faster, even if the wounds were less serious. I probably shouldn’t have been sent in the first wave to EMMC. The hospital staff quickly recognized that, however, and sent me to the ambulatory surgery side of the emergency department.

The procedure for collecting patient information at EMMC seemed too relaxed. Although I had given my name as Andrew Kekacs once, a clerk came in later and began addressing me as Christopher.

I had been “injured” for more than an hour and was supposedly on pain medicine. I told her in a groggy voice that my name was Andy, not Christopher. She didn’t ask for my last name and never realized that she had the wrong patient, until the very end of our interview when she said, “Now, your name is Andrew White, right?”