Hacker News Reader

Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

I think we can roughly split paramedic visits into “patient needs to get out ASAP” and patient can’t get out alone or with help of friends and family”, so I would hope they keep their shoes on for the first type.

But ambulances in with full sirens begging over their speaker-system to have pedestrians at Shibuya crossing let the vehicle through, is probably the worst thing about Japan.

As for your second question, I’m reminded of Bob Mortimer in Would I lie To You: “… then the fire brigade came and ruined the whole house” - “Bob, surely the fire was ruining the house” - “No, water damage”. Maybe if those darn firefighters had taken their boots off, there had been a bit more left of Bobs childhood home.

View on HN

>No, water damage

That's what we learned in fire fighting training. Everything that doesn't get destroyed by the fire and smoke will get destroyed by the water you use to put the fire out. A house on fire is lost. You just save people and animals and then you do whatever you need to protect the neighbouring structures.

I've known enough people who worked in EMS to know that it's very common for there to be little alignment between 1a)what the dispatcher is told 1b)what comes from dispatcher 2)what they see when they walk in the door and 3)what the person actually needs.

True fact.

Relatives in an emergency often act irrationally. I heard of an old case where a man suffered a heart stroke, and his child was ordered to phone rescuers. The boy ran to the nearest phone booth, said "my father is very ill, we need an ambulance" and hang the phone. He never said where. The ambulance roamed around trying to guess the address of the emergency, but when they found the family in the street it was an hour later and the man was dead.

> But ambulances in with full sirens begging over their speaker-system to have pedestrians at Shibuya crossing let the vehicle through, is probably the worst thing about Japan.

Unfortunately ambulances in Japan blare their sirens any time they are transporting a patient, and because they are free some people use them like taxis. So you may see an ambulance at 2AM driving down a residential street blaring their siren at full volume, going 5 mph while the medics call around to various hospitals to see who will take their patient with an upset stomach.

Once I passed a moving ambulance with the siren on...while slowly riding my bike down an otherwise empty road.

The result is that Japanese people seem to tune out the siren. If the driver isn't also on the loudspeaker telling them insistently to move aside, they assume it's not a "real" emergency.

> “No, water damage”

Bob should have used some of his Fuji 9, that fixes everything!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com