9-1-1 gap leaves crash victim out in the cold

Rudy Klewar favours his left arm as he recounts the O Avenue crash which left him pinned inside his vehicle for an hour while he awaited help from Township firefighters.
Photo: John Gordon/Langley Times

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Source: Langley Times

BRITISH COLUMBIA - Rudy Klawer left his home just after 4:30 a.m. on Friday, Dec. 4. He climbed into his 1991 Mazda pickup, and drove two blocks south on 224 Street until he reached 0 Avenue. A farmer, he was on his way to another farm where he was contracted to work.

It was dark, and the weather was cold and foggy.

At 0 Avenue, Klawer turned right. Two minutes later, he saw headlights and the ghostly image of a car less than 10 feet away. Seconds later, it struck his pickup.

Strapped into his seat belt, his body was shaken violently as the collision sent his truck into a ditch. He lost consciousness.

Then he woke up, briefly, and felt around for his cell phone. He punched 911 in a call his phone records show was made at 4:43 a.m. He remembers the 911 operator asking about “the other driver.”

Klawer replied that he didn’t know and couldn’t see. He was pinned in his pickup.

Then he drifted off. Ten minutes later, he awoke again and made a second call, this one to his wife, Eleanor.

As he waited for help he became aware of a powerful light. It came from a long, orange flashlight poked through the shattered glass by a maintenance worker.

“He stuck it in my face and right into my eyeballs, to see if I was alive,” Klawer recalled in an interview.

Eleanor arrived, she estimates, within 10 minutes of Rudy’s call at 4:53 a.m. She saw the Mazda’s engine block pushed off to the right of the vehicle. The driver’s side front tire was folded in two under the door. Peering inside the vehicle, Eleanor saw her husband, his body askew, his face inches from the steering wheel, and his foot jammed under the clutch. He was shivering in the freezing cold, and his face was covered in blood.

She found Langley RCMP and B.C. Ambulance paramedics already at the crash scene, and they all waited fretfully for Township firefighters to arrive.

As he drifted in and out consciousness, Rudy, 50, was aware of the efforts of emergency personnel, who at one point reached for their car jacks to see if they could be used to free him.

But the firefighters had the only tool that could be used to free Rudy: the Jaws of Life.

The Klawers estimate that firefighters and their lifesaving extricating tool arrived about an hour after the collision. They cut away the roof and a door to free Rudy.

What the Klawers, police and ambulance paramedics didn’t know was that no one had told Township firefighters about the collision until approximately 30 minutes after Rudy’s 911 call.

The Township fire department has begun an investigation to find out why they were not notified sooner.

Spokesman Bruce Ferguson said he is deeply concerned that either E-Comm or B.C. Ambulance System’s dispatch, failed to transmit the message to Surrey Dispatch, the agency responsible for dispatching Township firefighters.

“Surrey Dispatch received the call at 5:13 a.m., and we were dispatched 33 seconds later,” Ferguson said.

“We responded as soon the call came to the fire department,” Ferguson said.

“We were there in a reasonable time for the distance.”

Murrayville firehall responded. Located at 22170 50 Ave., Murrayville is one of Langley’s unmanned halls. When they answer their pagers, firefighters have to travel from home or work to the hall, change into their gear and then set off to the emergency.

Ferguson added: “That type of call should have come to the fire department at the same time it went to the Ambulance (Service) and the RCMP, but it didn’t. Our delay was not in the response time.”

An investigation is under way to find out how it happened and to ensure that it doesn’t happen again, Ferguson said, stressing that his department has no argument with the Klawers’ version of events.

After Ferguson’s comment to The Times, the Klawers learned from fire chief Doug Wade that the fire department “has verified that the call to 911 was transferred to the B.C. Ambulance System. BCAS failed to notify our dispatch of what is known as a combined events call, which automatically triggers a request to the local fire department.”

Wade told the couple that the Township has formally asked the BCAS to review the incident.

“We do not know if this was human error in dispatching protocols, in misunderstanding the nature of the call, or whether the system itself dropped the call,” Wade said.

Firefighters in most departments in B.C. are known as the ‘first responders.’ In fact, the majority of calls to which Township and City firefighters respond are not fires, but vehicle collisions and medical calls.

Firefighters are the only rescuers who carry the Jaws of Life.

Klawer escaped serious injury. He was released from Royal Columbian Hospital after six hours, and is now at home recovering from soft tissue injuries, severe bruising, and cuts.

“The consequences of an hour’s wait would have been unbelievably tragic,” Eleanor said.

“It is only just sinking in to us how fortunate Rudy was and how lucky we are to still be a whole family.”