Flutterby™! : Nice to feel needed 2007-10-24 22:12:01.8158+00

Nice to feel needed

2007-10-24 22:12:01.8158+00 by ebradway 3 comments

Chicago Marathon runner dies en route to the hospital:

"We need maps! We have no maps down here,"

Who says cartography is dead!

I think there's another interesting issue there, and that's one of the ambulance system. I get the impression from that article that this was a private ambulance service, especially since it notes that they stopped to ask directions from a city ambulance.

Out here the private ambulance services generally just have EMTs, not paramedics, and they're usually ferrying senior citizens from one nursing home to another. I don't want to denigrate their work, but it's the sort of thing that the dedicated people work in for a year or two after they get their EMT cert, and then graduate on to something else from.

I wonder if the organizers of the run paid to have them on call, and as an event organizer myself I wonder what the cost differences were between them and having extra city rescue service staff on call, and whether the city people were even available.

I was kind of ignoring that issue. My younger brother was an EMT driver in Florida for a couple years. In Florida, an EMT is a taxi service that Medicare pays for. Nothing more, nothing less.

I think, though, that that's a part of the issue: There's a set of domain knowledge that's necessary for each task, and even though we classify both of those as "ambulance", they're very different and the information flow is different.

I'll bet there's no official channel for how stuff like road closures flow from public works or the police, whoever manages that, to emergency services, but I'd guess that it does, and that part of the problem is that the private ambulance service EMTs are used to driving from one nursing home in the 'burbs to another one, and had no channel into the information flow that the city ambulance folks take for granted.

So as much as a mapping issue this is an information systems issue (and, yes, I realize that the line between those two is blurry), and it might be the case that the information that needs to get distributed isn't in machine readable form.

For instance, I rode to Point Reyes Station on Tuesday, and there was construction on Point Reyes-Petaluma road. I would love to have that information before I go out on a ride, and I'm sure that the emergency services folks would (occasionally) love to have that information, but I don't know if anyone actually has that other than someone in the county engineer's office keeping a spreadsheet of how much road surface the contractor has completed versus what they're billing.

I'm sure there's a plan for the resurfacing, but I've no idea if there's any way to warp that into something that'd actually be useful for my purposes, as in "pull up a map of where I want to ride, look for incidents".