That sentence caught my eye too, and I would have commented on it if JshWright hadn't. "If the two of us ended up thinking that this person was dead, then I knew that it was a legitimate black tag." Sending them all back to the red-tag area doesn't get you a second opinion, it simply passes the responsibility to someone else.

A better explanation might by that by taking this approach, he was tiering the triage, in much the same way that the neurosurgeon in the article's comments mentioned that they were able to "neuro triage" patients sent to them.

I can't begin to imagine handling this type of situation.