GP: An alarming New Year’s Day 911 call from an aide to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was obtained by The Daily Beast through a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request.
According to the 911 call, Secretary Austin’s aide asked the dispatcher to send an ambulance with ‘no lights or sirens’ because they were trying to ‘remain subtle.’
The 911 call reveals at least one of Secretary Austin’s aides was aware of his grave condition as everyone in Biden’s orbit was kept in the dark. It is unclear which aide dialed 911. more
Right…..
Still pretty sure he’s dead/dying and they are trying to figure out if the body will work or they just need come out with the “he died of complications while in the hospital” news headline
We don’ need no Secetary uh De Fence in Washington, we needs de Secetary uh De Fence at de border.
It could have all been covered over with a inflatable stand in, same as they do with Joey the fake.
secretary that pissed on the electric fence
Darth Stupid has permanent brain damage from lack of oxygen.
“His dick fell off! Come quick!”
Only if he’s that drunk Russian guy who got his whanger stuck on an extremely cold corrugated metal shed when he tried to piss on it in Siberia. I still remember that story from Paul Harvey’s The Rest Of The Story from years ago.
Was a hammer involved? Asking for a friend.
Laws on this do vary by state, but generally speaking when a municipal ambulance is called it is considered an emergency until proven otherwise, and failure to respond to it AS an emergency can take some liability onto the responders and the department if a delayed response causes further injury or death.
(and in this particular case, consider the ramifications of if the Press heard there was a slower than normal response to an emergency call for a Black Secretary of Defense, but ignore that for now even though in reality you’d better NOT in The Current Year…)
That said, a Code 2 response is a somewhat discretionary response and is appropriate in some circumstances. One thing you learn early on about approaching a nursing home is that you do NOT go up the driveway like you’re in the Macy’s parade with the full disco show and yodeler on unless you WANT to run an ambulance shuttle to the nearest hospital for all the chest pains you’re inviting. Sometimes it seems to be people react more poorly to being startled as they age, other times it seems to be the power of suggestion, still others its a kind of Munchausen’s attention seeking and still others is that the night
keeper at the facility (generally a poorly trained person in an understaffed situation) is REAL squirrely and wants any restive residents to be someone ELSE’S problem; whichever, even for a full-on emergency you avoid lights and sirens when in sight of the actual facility in order to avoid a subsequent mass-casualty incident.
Another is violent mentals and/or violent situations. I spent many a night in a darkened ambulance among similarly darkened fire apparatus, coalescing silently down the street or in the next block from where the cops are dealing with an active shooter/stabber/minister clubber, in situations where my unarmed presence would simply provide another target. The situation can be exacerbated if the crazy hears a bunch of sirens converging on his location and sees revolvy lights outside his window, so in order to not make it worse the lights are doused and the driving normal, even if its a man down or worse because it’s not going to help if you just irritate the guy doing the stabbing further.
A third is an assessed situation, and your confidence in the person doing the assessing. It is never accepted if someone calls 911 back and says “never mind”, because that person may be trying to deflect a response to a crime or be left alone with a victim, or may simply not be properly analyzing the degree and severity of an injury. However, we generally had a layered response where the police would go to any medical emergency (if available), an officer in a car would go to the same emergency, and an ambulance and possibly a medic unit would go too, depending again on location and unit availability. Whichever
asset got there first would assess the situation and may reduce the level of response accordingly; but this is a person with some experience and knowledge of what they’re looking at, and so you can have some confidence in their assessment. The police responses could be fun because they were good but that really wasn’t their “thing”, so they tended to be a bit cautious and want to dump the problem on us ASAP; that said, most of the time if the dispatcher said “8 Paul 99 on scene says step it up”, that would pucker your butt and change your gears because while they may be uncomfortable with some aspects of patient care they didn’t scare easy as a rule, so if THEY were worried it was usually a pretty good sign that I should be, and thus an “Oh Shit!” run is born..
Also, you may respond Code 3, discover its something relatively easy to stabilize like a broken leg, and then go to the hospital Code 2. This is because any time you disregard a traffic control device, regardless of your legal right to do so, there’s always a risk that someone in a car isn’t going to see you, hear you, or react like you expect, and an accident occurs. Accidents with already injured people are good to avoid and, if there’s no real benefit to going hell-for-leather to the hospital as the situation isn’t life threatening or time sensitive, then you could get in trouble if you DID needlessly endanger everyone on the road including your patient by driving Code 3 when no life-threatening emergency exists.
Would I have agreed to do that? Maybe. It kind of depends on what the dispatcher relayed to me, which isn’t in this article. If I get it as “Abdominal pains” or “postsurgical pain, patient responsive and breathing normally”, then probably I would have done as the dispatcher suggested and gone down the final street without sirens and – maybe – without lights. While it is in my state technically NOT a proper emergency response if the sirens aren’t on with the lights, it was a very common practice to NOT use the siren if it’s O-Dark-Early and you’re twisting down empty suburban streets because it brought nothing to the party while attracting the Ooh Ahh squad to get in your way; and even barreling down an empty highway you may not use the siren because that gets annoying after awhile and if you can see and be seen and there’s nothing to see, there’s no benefit to doing so. You would still drive energetically to the scene however as even abdominal pains can be something more severe, like a GSW or an aortic aneurism going to hell, to name just two, and certainly surgeons can screw up. (guy I knew, real nice guy, the kind that didn’t want to bother anyone got a liver biopsy and told his wife he felt real bad and was going to bed early. She joined him later and woke up next to his corpse the next morning; so yeah, belly bleeds can be a problem and while it’s nice to not bother people, situations like this can mean you’ll never bother anyone ever again).
You also want the patient to be comfortable within the parameters of not delaying care so if someone got there and said he was stable, sure, go slow and dark as you already have someone on the scene. If it’s a man down however, all bets are off, I’m driving right up to your front door flashing and howling and f your feelings.
At the end of the day it wasn’t my job to judge, but it WAS my job to deliver a live person expeditiously to the hospital, so the response from my driver’s seat is going to be colored by whether or not based on the quality and the reliability of whatever information I have whether I believe I can do that while still fulfilling a patient comfort request. The test to me wasn’t whether I would upset someone but rather is my decision one I would be willing to defend before man and God, and as always if there was room for error, error on the side of life.
I would imagine these people did the same. Big city FDs are very political animals, but the rank and file tends to be less so; and while you may have folks worried about their pensions and their political Chief, again its easier to defend a decision that results in a live SecDef who’s mad at you than a dead one that the press insinuates may be that way because you screwed up the response, with attendant allegations of racism and such if – God Forbid – the people responding are White and a Black politician dies in their care…
If Austin wuz in a grave condition someone shoulda called 811…
And specially ask for Digger O’Dell.
If you believe one iota of that completely full of horseshit stories that a SECDEF would have been LOS and WH unawares for days and two and a half active warzones AND the next day a THIRD active warzone started . . . if you fall for that . . . your simply stupid OR playing willfully ignorant fool parts in this charade.
Itz Winter, not Summery foo!
@aircubed
Today’s new and improved nickname …
Girth Vader
And for all you racists, and you know who you are …
Swarth Vater
An aide called 911?
Seems similar to that Paul Pelosi shit.
Austin and the “aide” playing “hide the sausage” and his heart overloaded?
Did the “aide” lose his hammer up Austin’s fat ass?
The gerbil was rabid?
Something doesn’t smell right …
mortem tyrannis
izlamo delenda est …
Has anyone actually seen Austin?
Anyone??
Bueller…
Naked paddle boarding alone at midnight is more believable.
An idiot like Austin on a long leash = the peril Austin left the nation in.
“I’ve fallen and I can’t get up……and there’s a gerbil looking at me funny”.
He’s dead Jim.
Is this a dead man, Doctor?