Friday, March 04, 2011 :::
Policemen, firemen, ambulance drivers, and the like are all valuable, but in almost all situations the first responders will be ordinary citizens.For the next 96 minutes — more than an hour and a half — Al, his brother Roy, bystander Candace Koehn, who saw Snitzer fall, and more than two dozen other first responders took turns performing CPR on the fallen man. Their teamwork saved Snitzer's life, in what may be one of the longest, successful out-of-hospital resuscitations ever.
What makes the incident even more striking was that it took place in rural Goodhue, pop. about 900, a town without a traffic light. I'm not sure how it makes it more striking, unless it's meant that more than 2% of the town was involved in this. The folks I mentioned at the beginning would have probably arrived more quickly if it had been a bigger town; also, if it had happened in New York City, there's a good chance people would have thought he was a drunk homeless person who needed to sleep it off. A small town is where my stereotypes would have set this.
::: posted by dWj at 9:50 AM
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