Living or working in high-rise residential or office towers has not been considered to be especially dangerous, yet the risk is substantial and growing.
Every year more than 360,000 Americans will die of a sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) and a large fraction, perhaps the majority of these deaths will occur in these complexes. No firm figures are kept.
There are three main reasons why being in a high-rise just about eliminates your chance of surviving a sudden cardiac arrest.
1) Access: 911 emergency vehicles cannot reasonably get to you within four minutes, which is required for an SCA rescue. You can bet your life on it – and you’ll lose.
City traffic, address confusion, buildings with entrance codes, elevators – all steal time. After four minutes, survivability for a cardiac arrest drops 10% with each passing minute, from 70% to 5% after ten minutes. Brain damage enroute. So time is everything with SCA’s – any delay is critical.
2) No AED: High-rises are not making automated external defibrillators available in-house, despite their negligible cost.
A public access defibrillator under $2000 – there in its cabinet in the lobby – can protect everyone in the complex yet they are not being installed. They clearly must be in the building beforehand when an SCA occurs, and our trust in vehicle-based responders is misplaced – something not realized by the public.
Emergency (EMS) crews’ jobs depend on their “attending”
3) Heart Disease: It’s your most likely nemesis, and you have to take its associated dangers seriously. Although US deaths from SCA’s are 100 times higher than from fires or smoke-inhalation, the AED industry is 100 times smaller than the fire department infrastructure – which plainly needs a new policy for dealing with cardiac arrests.
The prevalence of circulatory illnesses and their resulting high mortality amplifies the risk in tower buildings, where our densest populations are unprotected, means thousands are dying when they needn’t. And they are by far the easiest and cheapest to defend, if efficient funding matters.
“It’s a watershed moment for the heart safety and EMS communities,”
ElevAED has announced an initiative to have AEDs specified within municipal fire codes, to have them placed in every elevator lobby, for the public’s embrace, in cities around the world.
“It’s really just one more piece of equipment for the fire department to inspect in such buildings, to modestly expand their mandate.” says Jones.
“When they do, we’ll conserve rescue resources, with many thousands of citizens surviving each year that otherwise wouldn’t be making it. We just need some leadership to mandate an AED for these buildings, and soon.”
Contact: charles.mcglade@
