An Anne Arundel County 911 operator has been reassigned after telling the daughter of a man who'd just been hit by a car on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway Sunday night to "stop whining" as she frantically pleaded for help.Yep, a 13 year-old girl has just seen her father killed, right in front of her, and the response is "stop whining"? And the best that the county officials can say is "well, we still got to the scene"?
The man later died.
Right. Don't imagine that'll leave a mark on the girl's psyche.
But to change gears a little bit:
Back in the Stanley Steamer age, when I was a teenager, I was driving the family flivver on an interstate highway. I felt the car start to sag to the left and I knew what that meant. So I moved over to the right, quickly, and was on the shoulder when the tire went.
But it was a narrow shoulder and there was no way that I was going to try to change the tire with traffic whizzing by, inches from me. So I drove the car, slowly, and on the tire rim, to the next exit. Dad was some pissed off that I shredded the tire doing that. But I told him, pretty bluntly, that I wasn't going to risk my ass trying to change a tire out on the highway, just to save ruining it.
Not that I could have, anyway. The damn lug nuts were put on with an impact wrench. Even bounding up and down on the lug wrench, I couldn't budge them. A mechanic from a Porsche dealer drove by (I was driving a Ford); he stopped, told me to wait, and came back fifteen minutes later with a cheater bar and loosened them up for me. From the fact that I had the bumper jack set up and the spare out, he figured that I had the rest of it in hand. (Yes, my dad taught me how to change a tire before he let me drive the car.)
But I digress.
Changing a tire next to a busy highway, especially at night, is A Bad Thing To Do. Ruin the tire, ruin the rim, if you must, but get off the road and to a safer place if you're going to change the tire. Or pull off the road and call AAA or your local Pro From Dover to do it for you.
4 comments:
And they didn't fire him because that would be an admission of wrongdoing. It also ensures that when this family sues and win, the money will come from the county rather than EMS.
A similar dynamic occurred when DC FEMS let the LT who let someone die in front of her station retire before the discipline board reached a verdict, thus moving the liability for the settlement from themselves to the city.
Yeah, not going to end well, and you were smart! Way too many have been killed trying to change tires without enough clearance. It's not pretty when one is hit by a car going 70, trust me...
Ah, Anne Arundel Co....
I can change a tire. Hell, I can change *five* tires when doing 5-tire rotations on my Jeep. But if my tire goes flat and I'm on the freeway? AAA, my friends. Because without that tow truck with its blinking lights and all between the guy changing the tire and any tire, well.
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