Eight Feet Deep

A media out­let — be it news­pa­per, radio, TV or Inter­net — may some­times find it pays off to get scooped.

It was some­thing I found dis­taste­ful when ink ran through my arter­ies, to have another news pur­veyor break a good story. It was also some­thing I tried, at least on what­ever beat I was work­ing, not to let happen. But when you have a story that is a rel­a­tive deep, dark ques­tion pit one may have to let the com­pe­ti­tion jones go for a bit until some mys­ter­ies can be solved. A story that is sure to raise some hack­les in my neck of the woods is a fine example.

A  man in described by police as “men­tally chal­lenged” in Kir­byville, Texas, died of an appar­ent heart attack while wait­ing some 30 min­utes for an ambu­lance to arrive, accord­ing to local news out­lets. Kir­byville is about 40 miles north of where I live. The ambu­lance that finally arrived came from Sils­bee, about 30 miles away, and belonged to a com­pany that does not even reg­u­larly oper­ate in that area.

Now some­one wait­ing on an ambu­lance for 20–30 min­utes is a long time in a city or most sub­ur­ban areas. How­ever, I am sure there are rural areas in cer­tain parts of the coun­try, even in par­tic­u­lar por­tions of Texas which have to wait even longer. So even though the long “wait” is being focused upon by the local media — and I am not being crit­i­cal here, rather I am think­ing out loud — there are a lot of ques­tions which need answer­ing to make this a much more mean­ing­ful story:

1. The story states the Kir­byville chief of police and another per­son per­formed CPR on the man before the ambu­lance arrived. Does Kir­byville have a crew of trained and ade­quately equipped first respon­ders? I think I know the answer but I’m not sure. I think there are a cou­ple of  vol­un­teer fire depart­ments nearby but how many do first response on med­ical emer­gen­cies? If any do, where were they?

2. Jasper, a city of almost 7,500, is about 20 miles north of Kir­byville. They have at least one ambu­lance ser­vice, or at least they did. How many EMS vehi­cles are based in Jasper and were they all busy at the time? I don’t know. I wish some­one would find out.

3. Was the com­pany oper­at­ing the ambu­lance that picked up the vic­tim indeed not oper­at­ing in its reg­u­lar area? I’m not so sure about that since it report­edly was an Aca­dian EMS ambu­lance and this arti­cle says that Aca­dian was assum­ing oper­a­tion of Pri­or­ity One EMS in Sils­bee. The lat­ter com­pany had an air ambu­lance last time I drove by their head­quar­ters. The for­mer own­ers of Pri­or­ity One were recently con­victed in fed­eral court on charges of con­spir­acy to com­mit health care fraud and mail fraud, hav­ing bilked Medicare, Med­ic­aid, Blue Cross and Blue Shield out of  almost $1.75 mil­lion, by the way.

4. The heart attack report­edly hap­pened at that area’s men­tal health facil­ity. Does that facil­ity not have a defib­ri­la­tor? Are they sup­posed to have one? I don’t know. I’m just saying …

From what I can gather with these sketchy details of the story, the Kir­byville chief of police sounds as if he did quite a job to help that man and deserves praise for his efforts. Per­haps his city might reward him by buy­ing him a defib­ril­la­tor for his car, at the very least.

Yes, there are a lot of ques­tions remain­ing, even though tongues are, fig­u­ra­tively, wag­ging over the length of time it took for an ambu­lance to reach the vic­tim. But there are plenty of answers still wait­ing to be dis­cov­ered such as why weren’t first respon­ders there within a decent time inter­val with the equip­ment and drugs that might have kept the man alive and sta­ble? I will leave this up to the local media to answer these ques­tions since I don’t have time, nor do I fore­see any­one pay­ing me to solve these puzzles.