Hospital Gets 2 Emergency Cases From Out of the Blue

The kind of surprises emergency room staffs get are rarely pleasant, but the doctors and nurses at Holy Cross Medical Center received two in a row.

A single-engine plane had crashed into a residential neighborhood near Burbank Airport, but no one was killed and the injuries in the Saturday incident were relatively minor. Then just 28 hours later it happened again: A small plane, a crash near Burbank Airport--and no fatalities.

“It’s amazing,” said Dr. David Frankle, an emergency room physician at the hospital in Mission Hills. “They were very, very lucky.”

The pair of crashes over the weekend also highlighted what has become an unusual medical specialty at Holy Cross--aviation injuries.

“We’ve had a rash of plane crashes,” Frankle said. Just a few weeks ago, he recalled, Holy Cross doctors treated the pilot of a small commercial plane that had flipped at a Valley airport while landing and skidded upside-down along the landing strip, grinding one of the pilot’s hands.

“When there are small plane accidents, we inevitably handle the victims,” Dr. Richard Benedon, another emergency room physician, said. Holy Cross is near three San Fernando Valley airports--Burbank, Van Nuys and Whiteman in Pacoima--and has one of the few remaining trauma centers in Los Angeles County.

Emergency room crews are accustomed to seeing all sorts of bloody injuries and know that a two-car collision can be more lethal than a plane wreck. But on an emotional level, reports of a downed plane can make even veteran emergency crews brace for the worst.

So it was last weekend.

“There’s a heightened awareness,” Frankle said. With a plane crash, doctors logically anticipate extremes. Either there will be no survivors “or you can expect heavy traffic,” he said.

The first crash occurred about 4:45 p.m. Saturday when an Aero Commander 112 clipped power lines and a house before slamming into an unoccupied parked car on Kenwood Street, about five blocks south of Burbank Airport.

The single-engine plane had taken off from Van Nuys Airport a half-hour earlier and ran out of fuel over Universal Studios. The pilot, Richard Purvis, 63, of Anaheim Hills was trying to make an emergency landing at Burbank Airport when he crashed.

But Purvis and a 44-year-old woman passenger, whose name was not made public, were discharged from Holy Cross on Monday after treatment for only cuts and bruises, hospital spokeswoman Reenie Collins said.

Frankle had treated the woman, taking 30 minutes to stitch cuts on her head. He had been expecting something far worse.

“That’s basically the rule in emergency medicine,” he said.

Then about 8:45 p.m. Sunday the emergency room at Holy Cross learned that a Piper Malibu PA-46 had plummeted into a salvage yard along Laurel Canyon Boulevard in North Hollywood.

The prevailing reaction was “I can’t believe it, another plane crash,” Benedon said. One staff member, a former pilot, quipped with dark humor: “Looks like I got out of this sport just in time.”

The pilot, a 36-year-old Beverly Hills resident, suffered a concussion and multiple bruises on his chest and abdomen. The pilot, whose name was not released, was listed in fair condition Monday.

The passenger in the Sunday crash, Dr. Khaim Koifman, was taken to St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, where he sometimes works as an anesthesiologist. Koifman, 42, was listed in stable condition with a broken shoulder blade and cuts on the legs and right arm. The cause of the crash is still under investigation.

But the trauma team soon received a harsh reminder that not all accident victims can be saved. On Sunday morning Frankle and the emergency team treated an 18-month-old boy who was run over as his father backed a truck out of the family’s driveway in Panorama City. The boy died.

“It was the first time I really got choked up,” Frankle said, reflecting on his 15 years working emergency rooms. “I got teary eyed. I couldn’t take it.”