Man dies during storm when 911 calls unheede
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PITTSBURGH – With her boyfriend in severe abdominal pain, Sharon Edge called 911 for an ambulance in the early morning hours of Feb. 6. Heavy snow was falling — so heavy it would all but bring the city to a standstill — and Curtis Mitchell needed to go to a hospital.
"Help is on the way," the operator said.
It never arrived.
Nearly 30 hours later — and 10 calls from the couple to 911, four 911 calls to them and at least a dozen calls between 911 and paramedics — Curtis Mitchell died at his home. His electricity knocked out, his heat long off, the 50-year-old former steelworker waited, huddled beneath blankets on his sofa.
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• Twice, ambulances were as close as a quarter-mile from Mitchell's home but drivers said deep snow prevented the vehicles from crossing a small bridge over railroad tracks to reach him. Mitchell was told each time he'd have to walk through the snow to the ambulances; in neither case did paramedics walk to get him.
• Once, an ambulance made it across the bridge and was at the opposite end of the block on the narrow street where the couple lived — a little more than a football field's length. Again, paramedics didn't try to walk.
"We failed this person," said Michael Huss, the city's public safety director.
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Regardless of how deep the snow was, Huss said it was unacceptable that paramedics didn't walk to help Mitchell. If they had, Huss believes Mitchell may have survived.
"... You get out of that damn truck and you walk to the residence," Huss said. "That's what needed to happen. We could have carried him out."
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Shortly before 8 a.m. on Feb. 7, Edge made her last 911 call.
"I think my husband's dead. Oh God, oh God," she sobbed.
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The snow had long since stopped falling. It took firefighters two minutes from being dispatched to reach the couple's home.
They checked for a pulse, but it was too late.
"They said he was gone," Edge said.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100228/..._snow911_death
