DENVER (KDVR) — One of FOX31’s field crews tagged along with Denver Health paramedics at Denver International Airport on Friday to see how they handle the millions of passengers that travel through each year.
“We get anywhere from 20 to 30 calls a day,” said Lt. Tom Stoffer, a Denver Health Paramedic at DIA. “But for year to date, we’ve had 8,000 calls for this ten-month period.”
He said these paramedics respond to both large-scale and small-scale emergency calls via cars, segways and golf carts, depending on where the patient is located. They take both land calls, which are inside the airport and portions of Pena Boulevard, and air calls, which are on the tarmac.
“Anywhere on the 53 and a half square miles of the airport,” Stoffer said.
He explained they respond to a variety of calls and all paramedics here have an intense orientation period just to learn the airport and they lay out so they always know the quickest way to get to each patient needing help.
“We have the best response times here at the airport cause of where we station our paramedics,” Lt. Stoffer said.
Some of the most common calls they get, he explained, are falls from the escalators and moving walkways. He said they also get calls of people going into cardiac arrest, feeling faint and people having issues adjusting to the altitude.
“You thought you were going on a tummy ache, but someone is actually having a heart attack,” said Keane Ferretti, a paramedic and field training officer for Denver Health at DIA.
Both Ferretti and Stoffer have been at DIA as paramedics for several years. One difference about DIA is its distance from the city when it comes to getting patients in an ambulance, if needed, after the initial call.
“The way we deploy to Denver is unique to most other airports in the country and part of that is where we are located,” Ferretti said.
DIA has millions of passengers every year and is one of the largest and busiest airports in the country and even in the world.
“We are at around 70 to 80 million passengers,” said Tony Diaz, the training and exercise manager with Emergency Management with DIA. “This year, we are closing on 90 million passengers.”
DIA is focused right now on its Vision 100 plan as it anticipates more passengers to pass through over the next several years. Their goal is to make travel as least stressful as possible.
“When there is something happening at the airport, we want to make sure their travel is flawless or at least as close to flawless as possible,” Diaz said, “or feeling the impact at the very least.”
DIA is required by the Federal Aviation Administration to have a full-scale exercise that simulates a mass casualty plane crash every three years. That will be held again in 2026.
Anthony Sutton is a business strategist and writer with a passion for management, leadership, and entrepreneurship. With years of experience in the corporate world, he shares insights on business growth, strategy, and innovation through management-opleiding.org.
