A drunk-driver-texas fleeing the police, crashed through barricades set up for the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas killing a man, a woman and injuring 23.
According to Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo, 23 people were injured, five of them critically, in the incident. The victims who died were on a moped. Acevedo added that many of the pedestrians were leaving a club where a concert had been held. The entire incident only took one minute.
Eight of the 23 that were injured were taken to Brackenridge Emergency at University Medical Center, according to Dr. Christopher Ziebell, medical director at the University Medical Center Brakenridge emergency department.
“Seven were received right away and the eighth was transferred overnight from one of the hospitals across town when they discovered injuries that were a little more severe than they could deal with,” Ziebell said. “Of these eight persons, two are critically injured and in very critical condition, another three are in serious condition and are in some level of higher or intensive care. Two patients were treated and released, including the driver that was involved in this incident.”
Austin Police Lt. Brian Moon stated that the driver didn’t even stop, even after crashing through the temporary barricades. “The driver continued to drive after crashing through the barricades and hit numerous pedestrians before the vehicle stopped,” Moon told ABC News Radio.
Medical responders and paramedics from Travis County, were at the scene quickly because the incident happened very close to the hospital. Chief of Staff for the Austin Fire Department, Harry Evans said that the trauma patients were removed within 15 minutes and the rest of the patients were transferred from the scene within 47 minutes. The EMS team conducted incident training the week before and one of the training scenarios involved a car plowing into a crowd of people.
“I spoke with the EMS medical doctor in the night and he was telling me that just last week his commanders had gone through some mass casualty incident training, and one of the scenarios that they drilled on was a car going into a crowd,” Ziebell said. “So they had just a week ago practiced this exact scenario and debriefed on it and talked about how they could do it better.”
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