AFD ambulance backing into south entrance Mullins Center late last night
Friday night into early Saturday morning, although certainly stressed, our emergency medical system worked. Most times, the center holds.
At the first major Electronic Dance Music concert of the semester-- 'Life In Color" paint party -- a dozen patrons required ambulance transport from the Mullins Center to either Cooley Dickinson Hospital in nearby Northampton, Holyoke Medical Center and/or Franklin Medical Center in Greenfield.
Additional hospitals were used in order to keep Cooley Dickinson emergency ward from being overwhelmed, as this weekend is a busy time throughout the Valley.
The first call for an ETOH patron occurred at 8:00 PM, and Mullins Center Command terminated just after midnight.
In addition to the dozen transports -- 11 of which were alcohol related (ETOH) -- AFD's on site command center overseen by Chief Tim Nelson treated and released an additional 14 patrons for self induced illness brought on by substance abuse.
Agawam and Easthampton FD were contracted to assist AFD
AFD brought in two outside ambulances, one from Easthampton and the other from Agawam, to deal directly with Mullins Center patients so as to keep the five AFD ambulances available for the rest of the town.
The concert attracted 3,000 patrons and from around 10 PM into the early morning hours a stream of scantily clad college aged youth could be seen traversing Commonwealth Avenue from the Mullins Center back to Southwest Residential area, many of them stained with pink paint.
Chief Nelson was quite satisfied with overall response of his department, quoting baseball great Ernie Banks "We're all here, we might as well play."
"People are going to imbibe too much, that's just a reality," said the Chief, who summed it up succinctly:
"We planned for this and we trained for it ... The system worked."
The next major Mullins Center challenge will occur over for Halloween weekend. Let's hope it does not sell out with 9,000 vs the 3,000 youth who attended last night's event ...
Umass after dark last night (Mullins Center top left)
3,000 drunk kids...and there's no way for zoomass to control their drinking
ReplyDeleteMeh, drinking is part of the experience. 3000 out of 20000+ is a relatively small number.
ReplyDeleteSo is dying, but I don't recommend it.
ReplyDeleteThe 3,000 is a little deceptive. The event was capped at 3,000. Were it now, attendance would likely have been 6k+.
ReplyDeleteWell that was a pretty smart decision.
ReplyDeleteDouble the number of patients would have broken the system.
I would consider the staging of EMTs and the set attendance to be "controlled controlled substance abuse." Sad, really. Necessary, too.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I would like going to college these days. Parties are organized and community events (with attendance limits), you are unlikely to get good employment or start a company when done and the community now hates you. As opposed to just a few years back when we had parties and the police would leave you alone (they were more than outnumbered), you could make money when you were done and the community knew it was nothing without you and your family's money. The only psuedo authority I and most others ran into in prior generations was the professors and calling them an authority is a stretch, they were not there to watch you, only share info with you. I guess the young ones today don't even know what they are missing, they think this is the good college life. Jokes on them, the world is full of adults like Larry now, no freedom for them, it inconveniences yuppies, and THAT is a big deal.
ReplyDeleteHuh?
ReplyDelete11:31, parties used to be much smaller as communication was so limited. We could tell friends of friends or make < land line > phone calls but now it's much different - as Larry has found out, there are "apps" to tell people where the parties are at and they show up by the thousands. This is 10x bigger than anything we had back in the 80's.
ReplyDeleteAnd because of the general crackdown on alcohol use on campus, there's no other opportunity for large groups of students to congregate. We used to have huge pond concerts where half the undergrads would show up, and as long as you put your alcohol in a juice container you could bring it in. We literally used a shopping cart to bring beer into the dorms, as long as it wasn't a keg it was fine (of course we did that too but it could be confiscated). No more - the campus policies now heavily punish alcohol possession in the dorms, where before it was never enforced at all.
The result of all this is that neighborhood parties are much worse and harder to control than they used to be.
You might not enjoy being in college now, but these kids have grown up with cell phones and computers. Their definition of freedom is fundamentally different from previous generations as they have an online world in which they can do more or less whatever they want to. Strange but true.
Saddest part of the night is that two of those treated were 17-year-old high schoolers.
ReplyDeleteWalter, didn't you hear? Only UMass students attended..
ReplyDeleteAnd to enjoy having someone douse me with paint --- there'd have to be some heavy-duty drugs involved for me to think that was fun, I suspect that is true for most folks....