Emergency-access screening
Places closer to a runway than a CMS emergency hospital
A conservative story-finding table of US municipalities where the nearest qualifying public runway is at least five straight-line miles closer than the nearest located CMS hospital marked as providing emergency services.
Story finder
Search the complete screening table
Search by municipality, state, airport, hospital or hospital type. The largest recorded runway advantage appears first.
Methodology
How the comparison was made
- Downloaded CMS Hospital General Information and kept 4,498 hospitals where Emergency Services = Yes.
- Located 3,865 hospital addresses with the official US Census Geocoder. For 549 remaining hospitals, used the matching CMS city’s municipality centroid. Overall location coverage was 98.13% (4,414 of 4,498).
- Compared 16,241 municipality points with 3,878 operational US public airports. A qualifying runway is non-water/non-ice and at least 800m long by 15m wide; an unknown recorded surface is retained and shown.
- Calculated great-circle distances and published only places with a runway advantage of at least five miles.
Editorial use
What still needs checking
Confirm the named hospital still provides the relevant emergency service and search for local facilities missing from CMS. Check road, ferry and seasonal access. Verify the airport and runway in current FAA information and NOTAMs.
Rows marked “CMS city centroid” use an approximate hospital location and need extra checking. A recorded runway surface of “UNKNOWN” means the runway dimensions qualify but its surface was not populated in Sprinkle’s source.
Suggested source line: “Sprinkle analysis of CMS Hospital General Information, US Census geocoding and aviation reference data.”