Mullins Center Thursday night (be afraid of the dark)
If you threw a UMass News and Media Relations PR flack off the top of one of the Southwest Towers, about half way down he would tweet how refreshing is the air flow. Another one stationed on the 3rd floor would announce how well he is doing ... so far.
So I guess it is not surprising that, according to UMass spokesperson Daniel J. Fitzgibbons, our higher education officials were "satisfied" with the response to the Tiesto concert, despite the swamping of Emergency Medical Services on Thursday night for alcohol related calls.
In other words, get used to it!
So anytime the Mullins Center schedules a techno dubstep "artist" we can just write off emergency first responder service to the rest of Amherst and four other nearby towns that rely on AFD for ambulance serivces for three or four hours.
Yeah, that's a (pernicious) plan.
10 comments:
So let me preempt the standard responses to you, Larry, from the arrogantsia over at the University:
"Oh, Larry, you are so ungrateful concerning the University. Why, if UMass weren't here, Amherst would just a God-forsaken cow town...blah, blah, blah."
I'm glad that, in the lah-dee-dah atmosphere that we have in Hampshire and Franklin counties, there is someone obsessing about public safety. And you can see that it's beginning to affect the press coverage in the traditional media, as in today's front page of the Gazette. Would they be covering this if you weren't pounding away at it online? I don't think so.
Behold the power ...
Its actually 4 other towns amherst Serves, Shutesbury, Leverett, Hadley and Pelham. Amherst Fire simple doesn't have the manpower for everyday situations and responses nevermind weekend shananagins. It's getting scary.
Sorry, I knew that. Hot copy (in a pissed off sense).
I hope I get alcohol poisoning some night and simultaneously you have a stroke and the ambulance comes to my house not yours.
Anon 8:11
If I read you correctly, you had alcohol poisoning before this.
I would love to see the pie chart that shows the percentage of time each year when all Amherst Fire personnel are outside of the town's borders.
How about arresting all the underage drunks after taking them to the hospital? Maybe if the students start to think there's a reason not to drink so much they won't drink so much. Right now their behavior is entirely consequence-free.
I would love to see a chart about pies, too. I like pies.
Right now their behavior is entirely consequence-free.
Oh really?!?!?
If they are UMass students, CDH tattles on them to UMass (HIPPA notwithstanding) and they get sent to mandatory alcohol assessments and such (at their own expense). And then there is the secretive star chamber known as ACT which increasingly is becoming a lynch mob run amuck.
UMass doesn't advertise any of this because a lot of eyebrows would be raised if people really understood some of the quite questionable things that they are doing. And they are doing this for good reasons, or at least they think they are, and those who are victims of this stuff really don't want to discuss it anyway.
Personally, I would much rather see criminal trials -- in open court with defense attorneys and procedural safeguards such as rules of evidence, presumption of innocence and burdens of proof.
I am of two minds about medical care for intoxicated students -- and it is the same issue as medical care for those overdosing on Heroin. On the one hand, the person has done something for which he/she/it ought to be held accountable - the theory of punishment is not that it affects the individual's behavior directly as much as that it serves as an example to others -- and if there are no consequences, there is no disincentive.
On the other hand, we place a very high priority on the preservation of human life. My understanding is that even if AFD knows that someone is overdosing on Heroin, even if CDH has blood samples and all kinds of physical evidence (gathered in the process of saving the person's life) that will not be given to the police for criminal prosecution.
Because otherwise no one would seek medical care and we would have people dying which we don't want.
So too with the ETOH -- you aren't going to stop the kids from drinking too much as much as keep them from going to the hospital if they know they will get into trouble -- and then you have dead kids...
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