Latest news, weather and high school sports for Albany and Southwest Georgia

ALBANY, GA. -- When you call 911 you expect emergency officials to respond within a few minutes. 

On Wednesday November 17 while eating at El Vaqueros Melissa Goodin’s father Ron Gross went limp.  The family panicked, bystanders called 911, and a group of nurses sprang into action giving her father CPR.  As the seconds turned into minutes the family wondered where’s the ambulance since there’s a station half a mile away.

The official report says it took 12 minutes until EMS arrived at the scene.  Fire Chief James Carswell says Albany’s 911 system tries to be as efficient as possible, but there’s a lot more that goes into routing an emergency official to a scene.  “Sometimes they may think one's right around the corner, but in reality that vehicle is tied up doing something else which means the closest units available may be 5 or 6 miles away and have much further to come” says Carswell.

The C.A.D., computer assisted dispatcher system considers location, level of emergency, and responder availability when routing officials to an emergency.  “C.A.D grades out the information that’s given to them over the phone and determines what the appropriate response is.  From there the dispatcher who's doing the radio traffic will dispatch the units and provide whatever information the call taker has received and will continue to update the information as the units respond to the location” says Carswell.

The Gross/Goodin family say they understand now that the closest EMS location didn’t have vehicles and therefore couldn’t respond to their emergency.  They add that they are thankful to the nurses who performed CPR, the bystanders who called for help, and the strangers that comforted them in one of the family’s darkest hours.  Goodin also clarified that her father died of a pulmonary embolism, which is an emergency that is nearly impossible to save the victim.  “Now that I know the facts, I realize that it was my father’s time to go, and I believe that as far as the city’s EMS is concerned they responded as quickly as they could” says Goodin.

The family also took the opportunity to share the message that 911 calls are for life threatening emergencies only.  Operators are required to dispatch officials to a call so if someone calls for a minor concern they could be endangering the life of someone with a true medical emergency.  Chief Carswell says every day the center gets calls that could be better answered by a personal doctor or the 311 information system.