BOSTON — When a Wellesley man died of a heart attack aboard a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority commuter rail train last summer, rail officials vowed to make improvements in how they handle medical emergencies, the Boston Globe reported.
But officials at Amtrak, which operates the MBTA rail line, confirmed that they had ordered 13 life-saving defibrillators about three weeks before James Allen died, and didn’t put any of them in use. Since Allen’s death, Amtrak has deployed 7 of the 13 machines — but put them in Amtrak rail yards and stations, not on trains. Six of the defibrillators are in storage, idle until the entire 45-member Amtrak police force can be trained to use them.
At the same time, T officials said they are waiting for the completion of a $63,000 consultants’ study before instituting changes to their policy on how to handle medical emergencies on trains.
”We’ve accomplished a lot since we received the defibrillators,” said Amtrak spokesman Clifford Black. ”We’ve got them on [Amtrak] property and we’ve got 43 [volunteers] trained” to use the seven machines deployed so far. In addition, 60 percent of the Amtrak police are qualified to use the defibrillators.
”We feel that our response has been adequate and we will very soon have mobile units that we hope will be useful in any future incident,” Black said.
Placing portable defibrillators on trains has been discussed, Black said, ”but we currently don’t have any plans to do that.”
MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said T General Manager Michael H. Mulhern commissioned the study to help the agency ”regain the public’s confidence” after Allen’s death. ”That’s why [Mulhern] brought on a firm that has expertise in this area,” he said.
”Since July 30, there have been dozens of medical emergencies aboard trains, and all of them have been handled in a timely and professional manner,” he added.
Allen, 61, a scientist who worked in Boston, died July 30 after going into cardiac arrest aboard an inbound train. Despite his condition, the conductor made two scheduled station stops after calling for help to meet the train at the Back Bay station, 15 minutes away.
At the time of Allen’s death, Amtrak, which is contracted by the MBTA to operate all of the system’s commuter rail services, had no written policy on what to do during such medical emergencies. Days after the death, Amtrak adopted for its Boston commuter routes the T’s safety policy, which requires a train to stop as soon as possible for an emergency.
Medical specialists say a defibrillator could have saved Allen’s life. Amtrak purchased the 13 devices for about $27,000 in April and took delivery in early July, three weeks before Allen died.
Two of the defibrillators are in Amtrak’s Boston Engine Terminal near North Station and one each in the Readville and Southampton Street railyards. Another one is at the Route 128 station in Canton and the last is in South Station. Amtrak did not account for the seventh deployed device.
According to Amtrak, the 43 trained employees who aren’t police officers all volunteered to learn how to use the lifesaving devices, which have been shown to be exceedingly effective in the early moments of heart attacks.
Authorities want to put the six remaining machines in Amtrak police cruisers, making them the first mobile defibrillators in the railroad’s New England system – able to be quickly dispatched to a train in an emergency.
But Amtrak officials won’t put them into use until all of Amtrak’s 45 officers stationed here are trained by the end of the month. Thirty of the 45 officers are qualified to use the defibrillators.
Black said the machines aren’t in more widespread use because employees must undergo eight hours of training.
”We can’t do a mass training,” he said. ”Pulling people from various job positions restricts the number of people we can do.”
In February, Amtrak eliminated two top safety officials from its Boston operations, causing MBTA officials to withhold its payments for those two positions until the jobs are filled. Black said the positions have nothing to do with Amtrak’s slow response in getting their defibrillators on-line.
At the MBTA, officials want to see a study comparing their emergency medical procedures with other commuter rail systems nationwide. Since Allen’s death, the transit agency has reissued its medical safety guidelines to staff while commissioning a report with a Philadelphia-based transit research firm. The study is expected to be completed in mid-November.