From the EMS World Archives: Terror at the Olympics

Ed's Note: This article originally appeared in the November 1996 issue of EMS World Magazine.

After years of planning and high anticipation, the 1996 Olympic Games came to Atlanta, literally with a bang!

Although the Games were deemed a great success, and Atlanta exuded Southern hospitality, the long-awaited event was marred by the explosion of an alleged terrorist-planted bomb that left two dead and wounded more than 100. During the early morning hours of July 27, 8 days of excitement and relative calm dame to a screeching halt in what could have become an EMS nightmare.

Who’s in charge?

Supposedly, the federal government has spent $227 million to guard the Olympic Games with 30,000 police, military and private guards, as well as high-tech surveillance equipment. The very size and scope of the Atlanta Games—11,000 athletes from 197 countries—provided a security challenge that couldn’t be ignored. According to Billy Payne, president of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG), Atlanta would be the safest place on the planet during the event. For the first week, that was true.

But on Friday evening, July 26, after a long day, people were looking for a place to party, and a free concert was being offered in the 21-acre Centennial Park. The park is in the center of downtown Atlanta, and within walking distance of three major Olympic venues. Unlike the venues, however, where all attendees had to pass through metal detectors, anyone was free to enter the park without question. This was a place where sightseers and sports fans could capture the excitement of the Olympics, without paying high prices to do so, and thousands were taking advantage of the opportunity.

At 1:25 a.m., a blast shook the area, just a few feet from the platform where Los Angeles-based rock band, Jack Mack and the Heart Attack, was performing. When everyone realized it was not a part of the band’s performance, chaos broke out, and people began screaming and running, trampling anyone in their path. Just moments before, security guards had begun ordering people away from the area in response to a telephone call alerting them that a bomb was about to go off somewhere in the park. One security guard had spotted the knapsack that contained the pipe bomb but barely had time to notify the police before it detonated.

EMS response

Because media representatives from across the country were already on hand, news of the bombing spread quickly. To those watching the live television coverage, the EMS response was nothing short of heroic. In retrospect, whoever, there has been criticism from some EMS supervisors who say they witnessed a complete breakdown in the incident command system, as everyone rushed in to begin patient care with absolutely no thought of the possibility of a second incendiary device being on the premises.

“As far as incident management, we blew it,” says Don Hiett, Jr., assistant fire chief for Atlanta Fire Department and an EMS Magazine editorial advisory board member. “Law enforcement didn’t have anything to begin with, and EMS went in there like they were half crazy, with their eyeballs big and shining, trying to save all those lives. Those of us who have been around for a while know what happens if there’s no one around to control the assets: An ambulance pulls up and two well-meaning medics jump out, all excited because they’ve never seen an incident like this. Somebody grabs them and says ‘Come on, you have to go over there and help those people,’ so they go into the middle to work on a patient. Then another ambulance comes up, that crew piles out and they go into the crowd to help somebody else. They pick up the worst patient they see and put him into the ambulance but they can’t get out because the first crew is still somewhere in the crowd, and their ambulance is blocking the way. That was just one of the things we initially had to deal with.”

In spite of the lack of a structured incident command system, Dennis Lockridge, Marietta, GA-based District 3 EMS coordinator, was impressed with the EMS response, although he admits it may have been somewhat careless.

“I don’t know of any situation where you don’t have a secured perimeter before you go in that you don’t see the same sort of reaction,” he says. “It’s not that it’s the appropriate thing to do, but when medics see patients, they have a tendency to forget the No. 1 rule, which is to make sure the scene is secure before you go in. They have that desire to help people and they also get caught up in the excitement—this is what they live for. I’m sure no medic would say ‘Gosh, I hope somebody sets off a bomb and we have 117 people injured,’ but they probably weren’t disappointed when it happened.

“Don is right about it not being secured,” Lockridge continues, “but incident command just didn’t have an opportunity to set up, and it got a little out of control. But I won’t blame the medics for that; incident command was not established, but they reacted the way they normally would. Besides, the request that went out for mutual aid was not very specific, so we probably had more resources than we actually needed.”

In fact, a private service had one rescue vehicle prepositioned in the park, Atlanta Fire personnel were patrolling in golf carts, and Grady Hospital, which is the 9-1-1 responder in the Centennial Park area, had several ambulances stationed nearby.

“Centennial Park was an ACOG site, so they had their own medical support set up,” says Frank Bader, director of Grady Hospital’s ambulance service. “We’re the 9-1-1 provider outside the area, and this became a 9-1-1 incident, as opposed to just an ACOG incident. So, there was medical support already there, but it was a pretty chaotic situation. We had a couple of crews just outside the park who heard the explosion, so they responded immediately and helped establish the incident command structure with the Atlanta Fire Department.”

Complicating matters was the fact that the park immediately became a crime scene, which added to the confusion, says Pete Koerner, a firefighter/EMT with Fulton County Fire and Grady EMS.

“Anytime you have a bombing like that, there’s conflict right off the bat,” he says. “This was both a disaster scene and a crime scene. But the real problem was that there was no control immediately after the bombing, and you can imagine the chaos with thousands of scared people running. The police on the scene were trying to be paramedics rather than evacuating the crowd, and it caused a real cluster.”

Those closest to the explosion received injuries ranging from blunt force trauma and penetrating injuries to broken eardrums and cuts from shrapnel. There were only two deaths: A Turkish cameraman who was transported to a hospital and pronounced dead from cardiac arrest, and a female victim from Albany, GA. who was killed when she was hit by a metal endcap from one of the pipes that had been used to make the bomb.

“There were actually three pipes used,” Koerner explains. “They were packed in a Tupperware container full of nails, screws, and other sharp objects that would hurt people. Luckily, only one of the pipes had a blasting cap on it, so the other two didn’t detonate. If they had, this situation would have been substantially bigger.”

According to Atlanta Fire Department records, approximately 104 patients were transported from the scene by ambulance and another 20 walking-wounded were sent by bus. The numbers vary, depending on who you ask, but all patients were transported or removed from the scene within 34 minutes, says Don Hiett. By that time, says Hiett, he had arrived at the scene to start setting up an incident management system, the Bomb Management Center had been contacted, members of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) were on the scene, and an FBI SWAT team was on its way.

CISD

Although the bombing incident was brief for EMS, it had a definite impact on the responder, says Pete Koerner.

“A lot of these people were young, and it was real chaotic,” he says. “Even though there was only one fatality, and injuries weren’t as bad as what we see almost every day, just the thought of it being terrorism really shook some of them up. A chaplain and a critical incident stress debriefer came in and talked to them for a couple of hours. Out of 35 people who had worked on the incident, about 30 showed up at the debriefing.

Fortunately, the Grady providers had been prepared in advance for the possibility of a major incident, says Koerner, who made a training video that was played in the crew room around the clock in the week leading up to the Olympics.

“After the CISD was over, I asked if the training and preparation had helped at all during the incident,” he says, “and one of them told me ‘All I could hear was your voice on that damn tape, over and over, telling me what to do.’ Training is so important, and this incident really woke me up to that fact.”

Mutual aid

Because Olympic planners knew there would be thousands of people in Atlanta during the 2-week event, and because there was speculation about possible terrorist attacks, security was at a maximum level. Various groups from around the country were called into service to help ensure the safety of both participants and attendees.

Liliana Dorado, E4 senior airman with the Texas Air National Guard in El Paso, was on active duty with her unit at the edge of Centennial Park when the bomb exploded. Like most others, she didn’t know what had happened at first.

“Our NCOs all started running into the park, but we weren’t allowed to leave our post until someone relieved us,” she says. “I finally heard a call on the radio for all Air National Guard personnel to come help push the crowds out of the park so emergency vehicles could get in. But we still didn’t know exactly what happened until we went to a nearby hotel at about 3 a.m. to wait for a bus to pick us up, and we saw the news on CNN. When we went back on duty around 4 p.m. that day, the park and all of the streets around it were closed, so we were assigned to keep people out of certain areas where the police and FBI were investigating the perimeter.”

Immediately after the explosion, says Dorado, people were very cooperative and anxious to help, with the exception of the press.

“We’d try to push them back, and they just kept asking questions,” she says. “We finally had to sue policemen on horseback to push them out.”

Also deployed as a standby unit was a D-MAT CA2—a Level 1 team based in San Bernardino County, CA. One member of the unit was Sam Newman, MICRT, a respiratory therapist who is employed as a clinical specialist by Bird Products in Palm Springs, CA.

“Our team was deployed to Dobbins Air Force Base in Marietta to be used if there were any medical incidents, including mass casualties, that the local or state EMS could not handle,” Newman explains. “We’re specially trained in biological, chemical and nuclear incidents, and all members of the team are specialists in their field. We’ve responded to the Northridge earthquake and some of the hurricanes, and can deploy and set up mobile hospitals quickly in response to a mass casualty.”

Fortunately, the bombing incident was over so quickly that Newman’s team was not called in, although they were activated on the base in the event they would be needed.

“We never got airborne for the response, but we were set up to handle any possible large-scale incident,” he says. “After the explosion, we were Alpha Alert, which means the base was fully closed down. It was really kind of an anxious time.”

ACOG criticized

From a medical perspective, patient care went quite smoothly during the entire course of the Olympic Games. Some pre-hospital providers were unhappy with ACOG, however, and felt that the role of EMS was diminished during the preplanning stages by members who had inadequate knowledge about prehospital medicine.

“I thought it was ludicrous for the ACOG to form its own medical committee and to think they should address urban EMS issues,” says Pete Koerner. “They just went off on their own and wrote a disaster plan, but what good is a plan if nobody else knows about it? I wrote a disaster plan for Grady that went to everybody who could have had a hand in the Olympics.”

Heather Davis, EMT-P, a paramedic from Rural Metro Medical Services in Syracuse, NY, volunteered to work the basketball venue for one week and was surprised that her immediate supervisors were non-EMS medical personnel.

“The head person in charge of our venue was a epidemiologist from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),” she says. “Working for him was a podiatrist, and under that person was a rheumatologist. We found that very interesting. I don’t want to sound negative, but we found that ACOG’s highest management organization administrators, who tended to be non-EMS people, were planning emergency medical services for the venues. It became obvious that most of them don’t work in an EMS environment. For example, we didn’t’ have airway equipment in our portable bags. When we asked why, they said ‘We want you to move your patients to the treatment area.’ We told them ‘We understand that you want to keep the experience as positive as possible and don’t want bystanders to see everything that’s going on, but it might not be convenient to move somebody who isn’t breathing before we’ve established an airway.’”

Davis’ biggest concern was that neither she nor her colleagues ever received Georgia reciprocity, although they operated as paramedics throughout their stay.

“ACOG sent paperwork to one of our group, but the others didn’t receive any,” she says.  “We were told we needed to sent a $50 fee, copies of our National Registry certification, licenses and two letters of recommendation from physicians in our system, and if it wasn’t approved by the time we went to work, we would operate as EMTs. We never got the paperwork, but we were all scheduled as paramedics and each headed a code team on one day with absolutely no Georgia reciprocity. It was a good thing nothing happened; who knows who would have assumed responsibility?”

“That was members of the ACOG not knowing what they were doing in regard to EMS,” says Don Hiett. “They went to the Secretary of State 3 weeks before the games with a list of people they wanted to be made Georgia paramedics instantly. They’d had the material for months, but they had no idea how to organize it.”

“We got the job done”

In retrospect, EMS and ACOG employees performed efficiently, even while under the possible threat of terrorism. But were they really prepared?

“I would say it went fairly well,” says Frank Bader. “There are going to be plenty of Monday-morning quarterbacks, who will want to go back and second-guess what happened, but I believe that ACOG and the medical community were well able to respond to it.”

“We had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to handle the Olympics, and we had an incident that everybody would have liked not to happen, but it went well, and part of that was due to being prepared. The credit really goes to the people who were in the field and had to deal with this.”

Dennis Lockridge agrees.

“EMS did its job and did it well,” he says, “and I’m very proud of these people. They did a remarkable job all the way through the games, not just that incident. We were very nervous before the Games started and, all during our preparations, I think we were afraid of the Olympics. We’d never seen anything this big, and we lost a lot of confidence in our own ability. But when it came down to it, we realized we had the ability to handle the job, and we did.

“As far as ACOG is concerned, they put on an excellent sporting event,” Lockridge says, “but what the EMS community didn’t understand was that caring for those patients in the street is our business, and we didn’t need, nor should we have depended on, ACOG to tell us how to do our jobs. We were saying ‘Well, ACOG probably has the right idea,’ but we failed to realize that ACOG counted on us to do the job in the streets. No matter whether it’s the Olympics or the Super Bowl, or whatever the case may be, the people who run the EMS systems have to be confident in their day-to-day operations. If those are good, I guarantee they can handle anything that comes up.”

Putting any of the blame on the ACOG is just an excuse for EMS’ deficiencies, Lockridge asserts.

“It would be easy to say, ‘We had some problems, and we’re going to blame the ACOG for them,’” he says, “but we’re in charge of the EMS system, and if we messed up, it was because we didn’t do the things we needed to do. Our confidence was shaky going in, but, after the first day, we realized this was our system—we’ve worked it before, we know what it is, and we had to make the decisions for what we know was best. When it comes down to it, when people are good at what they do, whether they’re in Los Angeles, Atlanta or New York, they’ll get the job done.”