'We're trying to keep her alive': 911 calls reveal drama of Asiana crash
Passengers aboard the South Korean airliner that crashed last weekend in San Francisco frantically called 911, pleading for more ambulances to show up and help the wounded, recordings of the calls revealed Wednesday.
"We've been down on the ground, I don't know, 20 minutes, a half-hour," one woman said from the runway. "There are people waiting on the tarmac with critical injuries, head injuries.
"We're almost losing a woman here," she said as a 911 dispatcher tried to reassure her that help was on the way. "We're trying to keep her alive."
The reports were among scores of 911 calls placed in the minutes after Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crashed upon landing at San Francisco International Airport on Saturday. The California Highway Patrol released about 11½ minutes of audio late Wednesday.
Deborah Hersman, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said Wednesday that the doors on the plane weren't opened until about 90 seconds after the plane had come to a full stop. The standard is to have the plane fully evacuated within 90 seconds, the NTSB said this week.
Several of the callers said they didn't think there were enough emergency crews on the scene.
"We're at the San Francisco International Airport. We just got in a plane crash, and there's a bunch of people who still need help and there's not enough medics out here," another caller reported.
"There is a woman out here on the street, on the runway, who is pretty much burned very severely on the head, and we don't know what to do," the woman said. "She is severely burned. She will probably die soon if we don't get any help."
A male passenger called to report that "there's a bunch of fire trucks and a couple of ambulances, but there's a lot of people hurting on the ground."
Twenty of the crash victims remained in San Francisco-area hospitals, four of them in critical condition. One of those critically injured is a child who is being treated at San Francisco General Hospital, the hospital said.
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