Long Island College Hospital EMTs Fired for Online Postings

Ben Duchac

Franco Colon

Two goofball emergency medical technicians played Chatroulette and lost.

The pair had goofed around in their gas masks and flirted with girls in online chat rooms inside their ambulance between 911 emergency assignments and posted photos of it online before getting fired for their capers.

Medics Ben Duchac and Franco Colon of the Long Island College Hospital EMT corps took pictures of their antics. And Duchac posted the images on the photo-sharing Web site Flickr.

The EMTs were in their parked ambulance when they signed on to the Web site ChatRoulette, in which random strangers chat.

One of the images shows a laptop screen chat between a sexy brunette and the two medics wearing their gas masks.

In another, captioned "Franco Likes Safety," Colon steers with his left hand while texting with his right. It's not clear if the ambulance is moving.

"I made a mistake," Duchac told The Post. "It was unprofessional."

"The EMTs involved in this incident were immediately terminated once we became aware of their actions," said hospital spokeswoman Zipporah Dvash

Hospital Workers Rally State To Keep St. Vincent's Open


Elected officials, nurses and hospital workers rallied in front of cash-strapped St. Vincent’s Hospital today.

They are urging state officials to keep the Greenwich Village hospital open.

St. Vincent’s is currently $700 million in debt.

Governor David Paterson had given the hospital a month to develop a viable rescue plan. But the month is almost over and a task force made up of hospital officials, lawmakers and labor leaders has not been able to come up with a solution.

Workers say not only is this a crisis for the actual employees, but it is also a major problem for the community.

"The nurses need to rally because we need to be together. This has been a very stressful situation for all of us for the last couple of months,” said St. Vincent's Nurses Association President Eileen Dunn.

“I've been employed here for the last 20 years, so basically I grew up here at St. Vincent's; it's a family," said another hospital worker. "It's sad what's going on. But the real issue is the impact it's going to have on the community."

Union employees have already agreed to a 10 percent pay cut for the next four months and non-union workers have agreed to slice salaries as much as 25 percent.

The hospital has already laid off 300 unionized workers.

A previous deal to buy the hospital and phase out its emergency care facilities was abandoned after much criticism.