Rescue on the rocks of Catalina

As they walked up the hill overlooking the ocean, the Topanga couple only wanted to test the ham radios they’d been trained to use in a disaster.

Instead, Karl Tso and Deborah Ava ran into a real-life emergency on Catalina. Their quick work one night late last month helped save the life of a man who was half-conscious and bleeding at the rocky bottom of a 35-foot cliff.

By spotting the man and rushing to alert authorities, Tso and Ava set in motion a rescue operation that included the county’s Baywatch paramedics and an airlift to a mainland hospital in a county Fire Department helicopter. At a board meeting early next month, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky will be presenting Tso and Ava with a commendation. “Karl Tso and Deborah Ava exemplify how dedicated volunteers can empower themselves to help others in times of emergency, and even save lives,” the supervisor said in his citation.

Tso and Ava had traveled to the Camp Emerald Bay Boy Scout camp for an overnight trip with their two Cub Scout sons on October 23. At 9:30 p.m., as their boys played with counselors and fellow scouts, the couple took a walk up a hillside above Doctor’s Cove. It was high enough, Tso figured, to test out the two-way radios on which they’d been trained to coordinate community disaster efforts with the volunteer Topanga Coalition for Emergency Preparedness. The ham, or amateur, radio operators can continue to keep neighbors informed and connected even when cell and other phone services go down. “In a disaster, that’s critical,” notes Tso, who obtained his ham license last spring.

Part way up the hill, Ava says she heard an “eerie moaning sound” below. Tso shined a powerful police flashlight along the water’s edge, where he saw the injured man sprawled across the jagged boulders.

He’d evidently slipped from the same trail they were on. “The way he was laying there, I thought he’d broken his spine,” Tso says. Tso and Ava yelled to him. “We couldn’t tell whether he could hear us at all,” Tso recalls.

The couple ran back down the trail and alerted counselors to phone 911. Then they returned to the vantage point above the man, later identified as Peter Conn, 59, who’d also come to Emerald Bay with his son for the Cub Scout weekend.

Counselors and parents came to assist, but for a time it was unclear to Tso whether the 911 call was successful. So, using his ham radio, Tso sent out an emergency message for anyone on the mainland, more than 20 miles away. He reached L.A. Sheriff’s Sergeant Scott Bastian, a ham radio enthusiast who was driving home to Fullerton after finishing his shift at the Men’s Central Jail in downtown L.A. Bastian quickly phoned the Sheriff’s Radio Center and confirmed for Tso that “Baywatch as well as Sheriff’s Rescue was on the way.”

When the Baywatch boat arrived, paramedic Joel Gitelson swam ashore and, with the help of camp counselors who’d made their way to the injured man, immobilized Conn on a “back board” to prevent further injury. Gitelson then rowed Conn from the beach to the waiting rescue boat, Isthmus, in a borrowed skiff.

On the cliff above, Tso was happy to hear Conn complain to paramedics that his leg hurt “because that meant he hadn’t severed his spine,” Tso recalled. The Isthmus took Conn to a shore-side heliport where a chopper crew airlifted him to St. Mary’s Hospital in Long Beach.

Conn sustained a broken jaw and had swallowed teeth jarred loose in the fall. He also suffered multiple fractures of a hand, leg and hip. Last week, Conn was moved to a hospital closer to home, where he’s “making progress,” says Gail Conn, his wife and business partner in an interactive market-research firm.

The family is grateful for Tso’s and Ava’s quick thinking. “We owe them everything,” says Gail Conn, who says her husband could well have bled to death had he not been rescued quickly. “He was very lucky to be found when he was.”

For their part, Tso, who designs and builds homes, and Ava, a packaging designer at Mattel, found the experience a little “surreal.” But as Ava says, “It was thrilling that we were able to help the man.” In fact, they’d attended a disaster radio training session just two days before the outing. “It’s so ironic that we’d just been to the class,” Ava laughed. “And, then, boom, it all just worked.”

Regents’ landmark MLK hospital vote expected Thursday

After months of negotiations, the plan to create a thoroughly transformed hospital on the site of the former Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center comes down to nine people: the members of the University of California Board of Regents’ committee on health services.

The deal that UC Senior Vice President John Stobo will present to the committee Thursday morning at UCLA’s Covel Commons calls for the creation of a new community hospital—staffed by UC doctors, funded by L.A. County and governed by a newly-formed private nonprofit corporation.

Hundreds are expected to attend the meeting, a milestone in the difficult journey to chart a new course for MLK, which closed as an inpatient facility in 2007, following years of mismanagement, neglect and poor patient care.

The UC partnership idea was first put forward by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky last year in an L.A. Times Op-Ed piece and has gathered momentum ever since. The regents’ vote would be the first to formally link the county and the UC on this project.

UC President Mark G. Yudof supports the proposed deal and is urging the health services committee to recommend its passage to the full board. If approved by the committee—which is headed by Sherry Lansing, the Regents’ vice-chair—the proposed agreement would move quickly to the full Board of Regents, which could take action immediately. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors also would need to approve it.

“For myself, I can say that I am very, very supportive of it,” Lansing said Wednesday. She said that she had not discussed it with other regents but she believes that they, too, are committed, in general, to a mission of providing healthcare in under-served communities.
“I myself feel it’s a moral imperative,” Lansing said. “The holdback is that we’ve had these enormous cuts in the legislature…We needed to be assured from a financial standpoint.” She applauded the work of the county and of Stobo and said that she believes those assurances are now in place.

Under the agreement, the county would create a $50 million start-up fund for the hospital and pay $50 million a year to run it, with an additional $13.3 million in county funds going to support indigent care services at the facility each year. It also would provide a $20 million revolving line of credit. In addition, the county is spending $208.5 million to rebuild the hospital facility and bring it up to seismic safety standards, and $145.3 million to build a new multi-service ambulatory care center (MACC) nearby.

For its part, the UC would provide the “broad spectrum of physician services necessary to operate the hospital” and would direct any teaching activities at the site.

The nonprofit corporation in charge of the new 120-bed hospital—which could open as early as late 2012—would be overseen by a seven-member board of directors appointed by the UC President and Los Angeles County.

Although the UC’s analysis shows the new hospital would be expected to have a positive cash flow, the university system asked for and received a commitment from L.A. County to secure a $100 million letter of credit to “backstop” its commitment to funding the new institution over the first six years.

Let’s take a Great Walk

Urban hikers, take note: The Great Los Angeles Walk 2009 is fast approaching, and anyone interested in taking part in the cross-town odyssey (this year’s route runs from the Shrine Auditorium downtown to Venice, by way of some West Adams district architectural sightseeing) should block out about eight hours on their schedule on Saturday, November 21. Read more at
the Franklin Avenue blog or at the Great Walk website.

Here is a video from last year’s event:

Meanwhile, our friends over at Metro’s new blog The Source have created a guide to getting there via public transportation.

Zev with Placido Domingo, Hollywood Bowl 08/25/09

Zev speaks at United Way’s HomeWalk 2009, 10/07/09

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