Read A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases for Free Online Page A

them could have ever imagined.
Triage
is a French word that means to winnow out or to sort. It is an essential response to catastrophes where many, many people are badly injured. Most lay persons became familiar with the concept of triage after the horrific bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995.
    Rescue workers, physicians and paramedics are trained to quickly evaluate the conditions of those injured, to separate the living from the dead, the critically injured from those who can wait a bit for treatment. There were some beneath the Aurora bridge whom no amount of first aid would help, some who looked terrible, but who were only bruised and battered, and far too many who needed treatment immediately.
    Seattle firefighter/paramedic Andre McGann faced an awesome task; his instinct and experience made him want to start helping the first person he saw, but his job that day was to separate the living from the dead, and the critical from the other injured.
    Wearing a bright orange vest that read “TRIAGE,” McGann carried rolls of the thin colored ribbons like surveyors use, and a roll of adhesive tape as he went to work, marking human beings.
    Was the patient breathing and did he have a steady, moderate pulse? Was his blood pressure within normal limits? Was he able to talk intelligibly?
    McGann moved rapidly among the crash victims. Those in the worst shape got a red ribbon around the upper arm; they were to be transported by ambulance to a hospital ER at once. The walking wounded got green tags, and those who were in serious condition—but who could speak—got yellow ribbons. The dead got black ribbons. Later wrist bands would be put on with words that started with letters of the alphabet, followed by “Doe”: “Apple Doe,” “Blackberry Doe,” “Cadillac Doe . . .”
    Carol Ostrom, a
Seattle Times
reporter, would ask Andre McGann later to relive those first minutes after he arrived at the unbelievable scene. The most difficult task was examining those injured who were not visibly breathing. McGann recalled grimly, “You give them one shot—tip their heads back.”
    If he could detect one murmur of breath, he quickly slipped on a red ribbon. If they didn’t breathe at all, he tagged them black, and resolutely moved on to someone who might have a chance to live.
    McGann, himself the survivor of a pedestrian–car accident when he was seven, had lived though twenty-seven fractures and critical internal injuries. Being a paramedic was his destiny. He was doing the job he’d wanted to do for most of his life. He had only about five seconds with each patient, and he wanted to save as many victims of the bus crash as he possibly could. Like all Seattle Fire Department paramedics, he was conditioned to treat one or two patients at a time. He had almost three dozen in front of him. The name of the game was percentages, not individuals. It was agonizing for him to have to walk away from any patients that he might have saved had there been more time and more help.
    At Seattle’s prime emergency care hospital, Harborview Medical Center, the man who
was
Medic One and who had supervised the training of class after class of paramedics, kept in touch by radio. Dr. Mike Copass called the shots. It was he who would decide which patients would go to particular hospitals; no one could do a better job than Copass at assessing the capability of a hospital to treat so many injured. He talked to a medical command officer at the scene, and calmly gave hospital destinations. The worst trauma cases were loaded into ambulances headed for Harborview where they would be treated by crews who were adept at dealing with knifings, gunshot wounds, and accident victims. That was what they specialized in.
    Gradually, the rescue scene took on a kind of organized turmoil. MaGann’s tapes and ribbons marked those who needed help at once, and there were sixty-five rescuers, ten off-duty firefighters, five paramedic units, and twenty-seven aid vehicles on