Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - "When I say we brought in all the assets, anyone who is working anywhere went to this thing. ... It's all hands on deck, and no one's going to question it. This is our job. This is the role we've taken, whether you're a first responder, a police officer, or otherwise."
New York State Trooper James O'Callaghan was among the several first responders called into action on Friday when a tour bus, carrying 54 people onboard while traveling the New York State Thruway, rolled over and crashed near the Town of Pembroke in Genesee County.
A total of five passengers were killed in the crash, while several others were transported to area hospitals in Buffalo and Rochester to be treated for various injuries. As of Monday, a total of 10 passengers remained hospitalized at Erie County Medical Center.
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Several different emergency units and personnel answered the call in the moments after the first report of the tour bus crash on the I-90 on Friday. While all of these units work together and train for such a scenario to possibly pan out, O'Callaghan acknowledges how different a world it is when that training turns into reality.
"When you're going to those scenes and the magnitude of what you're looking at with the people everywhere, disoriented, bloodied, deceased, it really hits you differently, let's just say, versus a training exercise. But at that moment, it doesn't matter what patch is on your sleeve or what what you're wearing on your head... everyone is doing the same job. You're helping the people that need help," said O'Callaghan while appearing on WBEN with David Bellavia on Monday.
While most, if not all of the passengers onboard the bus did not speak English on Friday, O'Callaghan says emergency personnel responded very appropriately, and gave the passengers the best care possible.
"We have a language line, we had interpreters come in at some point, and then we used Google Translate until the phones couldn't, because there's just an excessive amount of people stranded or in the area, the cell phone service diminished. But I'll tell you, when you're looking someone in the eyes and you need to help them, that language barrier disappears, and you're able to understand and you're able to overcome and adapt to the situation," O'Callaghan noted. "I think this is a testament to everyone working great together."
O'Callaghan feels even the more seasoned emergency responders may have been taken aback at the severity of the situation before them on Friday. On the flip side, this was also a big learning experience for those first responders who may be younger or less experienced that their colleagues.
"This is one of those things where this is where they really found out you can train, and that's why we train, that's why we have good training. That's why we dump a lot of money into training and why it's important. But this is one of those moments where you realize exactly why we dump the money we dump into training, and those training days where you don't feel like doing them, but you know you should go and you know you have to do it. It all comes together with something like this," O'Callaghan said.
O'Callaghan admits he has seen a lot in his 20-some years of experience with New York State Police as a road trooper and a Public Information Officer, but there was one instance from Friday's incident he has never seen, and may never see again.
"I have never seen Mercy Flight helicopters come in militarily, one-by-one, landing right behind one another in a median. I looked over there, and I was like, 'Wow, that was something to see.' I've never seen that, but again, that's why that's important when they have those different events and different charities to fund them, they save lives. That's what they're there for," O'Callaghan said. "And when they stacked those helicopters four deep and loading them up with people, taking them to the nearest hospitals in the area for triage, that's important. An ambulance is obviously going to be quite slower because the traffic was backed up on both directions in the Thruway to a complete standstill. So, again, the importance of all of the assets and everyone coming together is key to saving lives."
As for the crash itself, while O'Callaghan says investigators with New York State Police have, in his words, a very good idea of why this incident occurred, there still needs to be evidence collected and interviews conducted before the agency can come to any final conclusion.
"Everyone's been cooperative. The driver has been cooperative, the tour bus coach company has been cooperative. And the problem is we need to get warrants to move forward. Those warrants, right now, are being done [Monday', we're working with NTSB. We have collision reconstruction, we have a commercial motor vehicle unit, we have the Bureau of Criminal Investigation within the State Police, the three primaries that are going through and sifting through this information. And this week, each one of our units will be going with the NTSB units to go do those same parallel investigations, working together - that's what we do, we collaborate with our partners - and we'll go work on those things. But for us to come out just with the information we have, which I think is very good information and say this is the cause, would be inappropriate for us," O'Callaghan said.
O'Callaghan notes the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is doing a collective investigation on the totality of the safety of what could have changed, what could have been done different. New York State Police will also do something very similar to that, but the agency will be looking more so at the cause and criminality of the incident.
"In law enforcement, it's a little bit different, and right now, when we say no mechanical, our collision reconstruction unit and our commercial motor vehicle unit were out there that day, they were looking at things. We went through it mechanically, there's no obvious reasons - blown tire, major mechanical malfunction like you lost something or something fell off that caused this whole issue - and they look at the most obvious mechanical issue," O'Callaghan noted. "Now, it might be a little different once they pull the data recorder out of that 2005 bus, which is pretty old, but it'll give us a little bit more. At the end of the day, it's going to take time. We will have something, I would say, a little bit sooner than two years, but that's just the difference between NTSB looking at a lot of different factors, taking in a lot of different protocols. We're looking at it a little bit differently."
One of the safety components of the bus that will likely be heavily examined with this incident is the presence of seat belts onboard the tour bus. While this bus involved in the crash was from 2005, O'Callaghan can confidently say the bus did have seat belts for passengers on board. That means by New York State law, they were supposed to be wearing those seat belts.
"The five that were deceased were basically people that were thrown around and ejected from the bus. If they had been wearing some sort of safety device, like a seat belt, more than likely they'd be with us today. That's all speculative, but given their injuries and given the totality of the collision, those seat belts are there for a reason, and that's why we push that," O'Callaghan said.
"I want to just push that, if I could, the importance of the seat belts save lives. That's what they're designed to do. I know a lot of people badgered law enforcement and troopers out there that have pull people over for seat belts, they think it's a petty thing. But at the end of the day, when we have to respond to a fatal, a car fatal, a bus fatal, or any fatal, a lot of times it's the seat belt. We just have to make sure that is the easiest thing you can do, I think, to be a passenger or driver of any vehicle. That is the easiest thing you can put on and possibly save your own life with. Again, this is a tragedy, but I want to reinstate how important those seat belts are."