‘There were fistfights over the victims’

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Murray County Coroner Larry Ballew, left, and Roy Orr, Murray Medical Center chief executive officer, talk about the new ambulance for Murray County Thursday. Matt Hamilton/The Daily Citizen

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July 6, 2012

‘There were fistfights over the victims’

Early days of ambulance service recalled

Anonymous Dalton Daily Citizen The Dalton Daily Citizen Fri Jul 06, 2012, 10:51 PM EDT

CHATSWORTH — Roy Orr said in the early days of ambulance service, fights sometimes broke out on the scene of a wreck when attendants from different funeral homes were scooping up the victims.

“There were fistfights over the victims, because there was not any medical control — actual fistfights,” said Orr, the executive director of Murray Medical Center who became certified as an ambulance attendant in Nebraska more than 40 years ago. Orr and his guest at the Rotary Club meeting here on Thursday, Coroner Larry Ballew, reminisced about the early days of ambulance service when the subject of a new ambulance obtained in Murray County came up.

“I never got in (a fight) because I never had to,” Orr recalled. “I’ve always been big and I’d just look ’em down. But it was a different world.”

Ballew said Murray Emergency Medical Services, operated by the county, recently obtained a “van-type ambulance” through a grant from the Georgia Trauma Commission (under the state Department of Public Health) for just over $72,000. The service has six ambulances, with three in service.

“The ambulance cost a little more than that (because) a mobile radio was put in by the county for $1,800,” Ballew said. “The county helped finish out with the money that was needed.”

He said it was in the early 1970s that Georgia “recognized there was a problem with ambulance services and the funeral homes operating them.”

“There wasn’t much control over them or rules and regulations guiding them, and then guidelines for ambulance, equipment and personnel were established,” he said.

Ballew was there in 1973 when the county’s ambulance service was officially launched.

“The funeral homes actually took it upon themselves to offer — I guess at that time what came to be known as ambulance service — to just go out and pick up people,” he remembered. “If a call came in for a car accident, someone at the funeral home would get in their hearse and it may have had lights or sirens on it, but probably did not. Most of the time they went out by themselves and picked up everybody they could just to help out. They would load the person up on a stretcher and they hauled them back to the hospital as fast as they could get there. If they had any (medical) training, it was just some they had just taken on their own accord.”

Because not much was done to help the patient medically at the scene, it was paramount to get the victim to the hospital as quickly as possible, Ballew explained.

“They just put them on a stretcher and got back in the driver’s seat,” he said. “The name of the game was speed — get them to the hospital as fast as you could. And there have been some horrendous accidents, especially at intersections where the hearse was speeding and they didn’t have the audible (siren) or lights.”

Services at the scene of an accident were certainly limited, Orr noted.

“Since it was funeral directors, it was the injured or the dead,” he said, “and they took them either to the funeral home or the hospital. And sometimes they transported both in the same vehicle. It was a competitive business, here as it was back there (in Nebraska), because I’ve heard some stories of how it was in the South.”

Orr said he was on the first official ambulance in Nebraska, a half-ton International Harvester model — a company best known for its tractors — owned by a pharmacist.

“Pre-hospital teams now — the paramedics of today — they feel very comfortable to stay at the scene and render a lot of care under the direction of the (emergency room) physician or staff,” he said. “They provide stabilization on the scene. It’s an unbelievable transition.”

Ballew said having a new ambulance breeds confidence among the attendants and emergency medical technicians.

“Now, you feel like you have a new vehicle with less miles on it that you trust a lot more,” he said.

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‘There were fistfights over the victims’

Early days of ambulance service recalled

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