Hundreds of racers, bad weather keep Wilkes EMS members busy
By KIP BURKE news editor

Thousands of motocross families kept an eye on threatening skies Saturday as weather added to the EMS public safety burden.

Members of the Wilkes County Emergency Medical Service may have had their all-time busiest weekend this past weekend, Director Blake Thompson said Monday, tending to hundreds of motocross racers in addition to caring for local residents.

"I know they're exhausted, but they did an excellent job," he said. "This is absolutely the busiest we've been, but the race promoter told all those riders that we were the best medical team he had seen in 30 years of racing all over the country."

Hundreds of motocross riders came into town Friday for practice prior to Saturday and Sunday's qualifying races, and soon the casualties began to mount. By Sunday night, the 12 Wilkes EMTs had treated 30 riders for everything from scrapes to nasty compound fractures and head injuries. "We took 10 to hospitals by ambulance, and four were flown by air ambulance," he said.

The situation was complicated by construction delays on I-20, forcing at least one ground ambulance run to be shifted to an air ambulance.

Many of the racers with minor injuries were treated by EMS at the race track and family members transported them to Wills Memorial Hospital or to their home hospitals for further treatment.

At the peak of the action, assistance came from surrounding counties. "We have mutual aid agreements with surrounding counties," Thompson said. "This weekend we had to call in units from Greene, Elbert, and Lincoln counties to handle individual patients." The agreement provides county-to-county help at no cost, he said. "We help them all the time, and it works well."

The regular emergency calls still came in, and Wilkes EMS handled them, too. One local resident suffered a stroke, and the medical team treated the victim and had an air ambulance transport her. "We didn't have any delays reaching local calls," he said.

The weekend was further complicated by Saturday afternoon's tornado warning. "We were watching the Doppler radar on computer in the track's tower," he said. "We were really concerned about the crowd of thousands who were out in the open or in motor homes, and made preparations to move everybody to low ground if we needed to. Thank God we didn't need to - it would have been a mess."

One thing about the weekend's high medical traffic that wasn't a concern was the cost to Wilkes County of EMS care. Although he prefers to focus on lives saved, Thompson said that, because most racer families have private insurance, supporting motocross races at Aonia doesn't cost the county a dime. "We don't lose money covering races, I can tell you that."

And to top off a tough weekend, Sunday evening brought the report of "a plane crash" in Rayle. Thompson said his exhausted people mounted up and prepared for a mass casualty extraction from the woods, only to findout that the reported crash was actually an emergency landing by an ultralight aircraft, and the pilot was not injured. "God was good to us on that one."