Last night I drove Rescue 1 for the first time. Brian Shore took Travis, Goof, Bubbie, Sergei, and me out to Memorial Park to drive around the parking lot. Aside from almost clipping the Chief of Police's car, almost jumping a curb, and many bounces over speed bumps, we all did pretty well I think. After we got some dinner and hung out at Rescue until I was asked to come home because apparently my cat Kodee has become a menace. Time to drug him up with Clomicalm again... argh...
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I read this article and just could not believe the nasty tone. What is so wrong with a Jewish organization making an ambulance company to cater to the community? Is it any more wrong to make a Catholic High School? Or what about Catholic Homes for the Elderly? Why do these things exist? Because a community knows how to serve itself better than an outsider. Why can't a Catholic go to a secular school and learn religion after school? My answer is that they should not have to. If resources exist to customize a program for a group, and private money is funding it then I see no reason to avoid making that service available. The author of that blog entry implies that FDNY is somehow better prepared to handle medical calls. I don't see how that is the case. A volunteer and a FDNY employee both go through the same EMT or Medic class. A volunteer might only respond to 2 calls in a day which means he is not as tired or frustrated as the FDNY guy that has been on 8 runs already, and the FDNY guy quite possibly could just care about his paycheck.
The volunteer wants to be there. Additionally the volunteers carry Oxygen, Defib, and trauma gear in their personal vehicles. So if it takes 30 seconds for a volunteer to respond then they can begin treatment minutes before a FDNY crew would arrive. Additionally if a Jew passes away, a volunteer will not leave the body unattended because they know it is not permissable. When you call FDNY what are the chances that they will have a Jewish EMT on board that will be willing to sit for 4 hours with a body while the funeral home comes? What are the chances that they would be allowed to even if they knew the body couldn't be left alone? What about understanding that Jewish girls have some issues with being touched? When a volunteer responds to a Jewish girl they walk in with an understanding of how to treat the person without making them upset. They also walk in with an understanding of Hebrew and many times Yiddish which can help in some neighborhoods in Brooklyn where English is the second language.
The simple fact is that ambulances like this one are needed. They are needed just as much as Catholic Schools are needed. If tomorrow there was a Christian Volunteer Ambulance I would support it 100% if they were well trained, would respond to anyone in need, and offered value to their community as well as taking burden off the 911 system. I can't help but think that the author of that article is just a bitter sad little person, or someone that just doesn't like Jews. I am not quick to throw out the anti-semite card, but I have to ask myself what the motivation of that article was. G-d forbid they should ever need help.
As September 11th approaches I can't help but feel really really sad. Sometimes I look through my photos that I collected from various places. It never gets easier to think about that day even now that two years has past. I remember it clearly. On September 10th, 2001 I was down at AOL in Virginia having a security meeting. I drove home to New York with my co-workers, and I got to bed rather late. I woke up in the morning to my ambulance pager going off. I figured it was a normal chest pain call or such. Then I heard the dispatcher. It was chaos. (The same kind of chaos we had in the first few minutes of the Blackout of 2003.) I met up with my coordinators down on 67th Street in about a minute. From the time I got out of bed to the time I met up with them, I had no idea what had happened. Andy, one of my ambulance coordinators, said a small plane had hit the towers. As Andy and David and I drove down to the WTC we were getting ready mentally for a small incident with maybe a few floors damaged and some loss of life. We parked down on Fulton Street, just east of Broadway. From there we walked to the east side of the towers. Looking up you could tell something much worse than a small plane had hit. Papers were falling everywhere, and we could see many floors blown out.
Andy, David, and I walked to West Street (the west side of the towers) to meet up with other units from my ambulance company. It was when we were over there planning to walk down to the south side of the tower when a huge chunk of the south tower flew out over West Street. We evacuated up to Chambers Street in an ambulance, and after the debris cleared out of the air we went back to help. It was dark as night when the debris was all around us. You couldn't see anything. That day I took 2 people from the towers. Both of them maintenance workers from the WTC. Most of the rest of the day was spent on the Upper East Side covering for 911 calls. I went on a few 911 runs, and that night I went back down to the towers to help out. When we were waiting in line with my ambulance to assist we got an ambulance call on the Upper East Side so I had to respond back to my district.
The rest of the week pretty much I just did ambulance calls or errands or whatever I could think to do that was helpful. I am leaving out lots of stuff from that horrible day, and that week, because it's really hard to think about. Even now. Two years later. If it weren't for the blackout a few weeks ago I would probably be doing better this year. That whole experience was so much like 9/11, but luckily the night turned in to more of a party than a bad thing. It was just the first 2 hours or so of that night that really got to me. The time when I knew something really bad had happened, but I wasn't sure what, and we didn't know how long we'd be in the dark.
I really need for 2004 to be uneventful. I just need one year to go by without some big incident, and then maybe I can not be such a flake when September rolls around. My heart goes out to all the families that lost love ones. For them every September will be a sad time. The Shapiros are one such family. Sareve Dukat was the mother of my ex-girlfriend Athena Dawn Shapiro, and her sister Lauren Rebecca Shapiro who was also a close friend of mine. I dated Athena when she lived at home with her parents. I spent a lot of time around her mother. Athena invited me to her mother's memorial service. It was hard for me, but I went because I knew it was harder for Athena and Lauren to be there. Sareve was only 53 years old. Her life was stolen from her. It makes me ill just to think about how thousands of families were affected by WTC, Pentagon, and Pennsylvania plane crashes.
At my day job I am a System Engineer for a large publishing company. My boss Tony and I were sitting in a meeting at 4:15p.m. when the lights went out. We looked out the window to see if it was just us, and noticed that it looked a little dark at Chase next door. Then we noticed flashing emergency lights flashing on some of the floors across the street. I turned on my ambulance radio to see if I could figure out what was going on. It was silent which is not normal. Then I heard my mid-town ambulance trying to reach anyone on the air. I realized the blackout was at least from 50th -> 47th street because the mid-town bus sits on 47th and 5th Avenue. 6 minutes later the dispatcher came back on the air. H-Base, the radio ID of our dispatcher, started asking units to respond to buses in all neighborhoods from down in Manhattan all the way up to the catskills. I knew it was -very- bad. I half thought that Indian Point or some other nuclear plant blew, and an EMP disrupted the power. All sorts of horrible thoughts ran through my head. I was kind of freaked. I had some flashbacks to 9/11. I just could not stay in the office. I needed to get outside to the street. I felt like I was in a very very small box and I was in danger being inside. It's hard to explain, but I think I have some idea what soldiers that come home from a war feel when they say they have flashbacks. It's really scary when you feel like you are back in a dangerous place, and you aren't sure what to do, but you know you need to not be where you are. Tony and I went to our dark cave of an office.
With no windows in our office we had to use laptops to light the way. I just held up my laptop in front of me and the screen lit the way. We each threw laptops in our bags to use if we needed them when the power came back, and then we went to my car a block away on 50th and Broadway. There were people everywhere. It was just like back on 9/11 as far as people in the streets, and lots of confusion. It was a wild sight seeing all the traffic lights in mid-town dark. We drove with my lights and sirens in my car up to 85th and Lexington where the ambulances for my neighborhood usually are parked. Tony and I drove to the 19th Precinct on 67th and Lexington in one of the ambulances with a bunch of EMTs. One ambulance stayed behind on 85th and Lexinton because our Synagogue is there so it was likely that someone needing help might go there. Most of us went down to 67th street though because that was going to be our main base of operations. From 67th street we took calls from my ambulance company and 911 calls because 911 was down from 4:15p.m. until about 6:15p.m.
Right before the 911 system came back up I assisted FDNY in getting some people out of an elevator at the 63rd and Lexington subway station. One person needed medical treatment so we took them to a local hospital, but everyone else was able to go although they had nowhere to go because none of them lived in Manhattan. Most of them were going to try to walk home to the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. After leaving Lenox Hill we went back to the 19th Precinct where I dispatched for the Upper East Side and relayed messages to the Upper West Side dispatcher because they were too far from the tower to hear H-Base. (Our main dispatcher.) We took calls through the evening. Tony got lucky. One of the EMTs on my ambulance was driving home to Long Island so Tony was able to catch a ride with him to get home to his wife and two kids.
By around 8pm or so we got nervous because our ambulances only had half a tank of fuel and our explorers also were low. We found the firehouse on 103rd and 3rd Avenue had Diesel gas and they had a generator that was still working. To pump gas you need electricity. There was nowhere with gas and electricity in the whole city. We found that Metropolitan Hospital on 97th between 1st and 2nd avenue had regular gas on a pump that was on the generator. They let us pump from them to fill our explorers up. There is no amount of thanks that I could give Metropolitan Hospital and the firefighters of the 103rd street firehouse that would be enough to thank them for keeping our ambulances in operation. Both of them needed the gas for their own vehicles so by giving gas to us they risked their own rigs not having gas, but they still helped us out. Kindness is not something you think about often when you think about New York City.
With full tanks of gas we were able to run the engines on the ambulances full-time without worrying that we'd run out of fuel. We were turning them off and running the radios off of the battery to save gas, but that was dangerous because if the battery got too low then the ambulance wouldn't start up again and we'd have to jump-start it. We had a few calls during the evening. The worst call I heard was a double stabbing in Brooklyn. Aside from that there wasn't any violence that I heard on the radios at all. Our operation was extremely coordinated and well done. It wasn't anywhere near the chaos of 9/11. H-Base would give a call to a regional base over one radio channel and that regional base would dispatch resources to handle the job using a secondary radio channel. It worked without a hitch. In some ways I felt like dispatching was going smoother than when a normal night when there is electricity, but that's because instead of one dispatcher there was maybe 10 dispatchers taking car of managing calls, and each regional dispatcher knew their neighborhood because they lived there.
At around midnight things got quiet. From about 3am until 5:30 when the sun started coming up I drove around the city just seeing what was doing. At Bryant Park on 42nd and 6th Avenue I saw people sleeping all over the park. Some people pushed chairs together to make a bed for themselves. Others were sleeping on the grass. I saw two people having sex even. (I really didn't need to see that though.) In Times Square I saw that NYPD had setup ESU trucks with bright lights up so it was pretty well lit up there. People were all over the sidewalks sleeping or talking. The side streets around the Empire State Building were completely shut down, and there were two NYPD cars on the avenue which was unusual because I didn't see any NYPD camped out at any other locations aside from Times Square. I assume maybe because the city was afraid of terrorism during the blackout maybe? Anyway I saw lots of stuff on the overnight. I saw Mr. Softee ice cream trucks around the city. I thought that was a really smart idea of them to come in to NYC. I saw business men wearing suits sleeping on park benches in Central Park. I saw the United Nations in total darkness. People were all over the sidewalks in front of Grand Central Station on 42nd Street. Some buildings in mid-town seemed to have good generators because through the whole thing I saw some buildings comepletely lit up, but it was only a handful of buildings. I wished my apartment building had a generator. It was completely dark at my building. My doorman was camped out on a lawn chair in front of the building with candles lighting up the lobby. I gave him and the maintenance guys whatever snacks I had in my apartment.
Morning came and the lights were still out on the Upper East Side. At 9:00a.m. I decided to venture in to mid-town to see if the lights were on at the office. I heard rumors that lights were on there, but I had not seen any lights on since 4:15pm on Thursday. Sure enough there was some power in mid-town. I went to a friend's office on 50th and 6th avenue. We found everything on. Thankfully the plumbing was working so I was able to use a functional bathroom for the first time in 24 hours. You really can't imagine how bad it was to not find working bathrooms all night. At Lenox Hill Hospital there was working plumbing but there were no lights in the bathroom. Just when I was going to head over to my office a block away there was an ambulance call in mid-town on 38th street. So my friend and I responded in our cars (with lights and sirens) down there. We found that part of the city was still without power so apparently not all of mid-town was back up on the grid. We couldn't find the patient so we left the call as unfounded. I headed back to 85th and Lex where we had been stationed for much of the night.
Some time later we had the hardest call of the night. We helped carry a woman that was pregnant with triplets down from the 17th floor to the lobby because we was unable to walk the 17 flights so she was trapped in the apartment. I was just dead tired after that. It was like noon, and the power wasn't on yet on the Upper East Side. I had been working on the ambulance for 20 hours now without sleep. I hadn't had a meal in 24 hours and I had been awake for 29 hours. I was hungry and tired and just wanted to crawl in to bed and turn the air conditioner on. My last stop before going home at 4pm (24 hours after the blackout began) was to go to my butcher, Park East, on 84th and 2nd Avenue. I had heard rumors that at 4am they had come to work and cooked all the meat before it thawed so they could sell it and it woldn't go bad. They were extremely nice. I had no money because no ATMs were working so they let me give them my credit card number so I could buy food so I could eat over the weekend. Even at 5pm there was no power on the Upper East Side. I didn't know if I needed food for Friday night or for the weekend. My butcher had some steaks that had not even thawed yet so I treated myself to steaks, and cooked chicken, chulent, potato kugel, barley, and green bean salad. I went home and cooked up the steaks on my gas stove (thank g-d they didn't update my kitchen to have an electric one.) I had my steaks and then plopped in to my bed.
I woke up to my phone ringing. I had plugged in an old phone that didn't need power before going to sleep so I would hear the phone if there was an ambulance call. My father got me on the phone at around 7:30p.m. ... right before shabbos was starting... and it seemed the power was back on. I had no clue because I had all my circuit breakers off so I wouldn't hurt my computer equipment when the power came on. I quickly ran to the breaker box. I turned everything on... closed the windows... stood in front of the air conditioner for 5 minutes.. and then used my nice comfortable bathroom for the first time since the morning before. It was off to bed after that because I didn't know when the next ambulance call would come, and I needed to be rested because I felt really sick from being up so long, and not eating or drinking right.
Saturday came and here it is. The power is still on. I'm still here. NYC appears to have survived. I really could use a nap.
Well it's the 4rth of July. The Department of Homeland Security here has the threat level elevated. On my ambulance we have not so many people around so I can't really go anywhere this weekend. Tonight I hope to see the fireworks over by the East River. They close the highway from 14th street to 42nd street, but I live up in the 80s so I'll have to just go to Carl Shurz park and hope for the best. In past years the view has been pretty good. I hope the weekend is quiet, and emergency-free.
Today I worked at the Israeli Day Parade in New York City. What a fun time I had. It was rainy, but still it was fun. I am in the picture on the right wearing my bright yellow EMS vest. That rickety cart I am in was my emergency vehicle for the parade.
This year was very quiet. I was stationed by Grand Army Plaza on 5th Avenue by 59th Street. Because of the rain many people didn't show up for the parade. Sad for the parade. Nice for me. :) Because of the rain they had to cancel the concert in the park that normally happens. Aside from having to listen to the Pro-Palestinians that protest against Israel right where I was stationed it was a good day. It amazes me how these people can come out in support of palestinians. One ride on a bus in Israel with one of their suicide bombing brothers, and I bet their perspective changes a little.
