It’s 8:52 on a Thursday night when the red phone rings at the First Aid Care Team office.
A 911 dispatcher tells Cornelia Smith, an emergency medical technician, that a woman has injured her leg at 4500 S. State St. That’s a high-rise building in the Robert Taylor Homes, the largest public housing development in the world.
Smith and three other technicians hustle into action, throwing on their jackets and grabbing equipment.
But they don’t hop into an ambulance and speed off toward the scene.
They walk-past gang members, over strewn beer bottles and through one of the city’s poorest areas.
And, as with almost every call, they beat the Fire Department paramedics by several minutes. The 4500 building is right next to their own, at 4444 S. State St.
The First Aid Care Team, FACT for short, is a unique first-response unit of emergency medical technicians who operate directly out of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Robert Taylor Homes, a poor and often violent development that stretches for two miles along the Dan Ryan Expressway.
Extra minutes can obviously save lives, but there is another, equally important effect. By arriving early, the technicians help to ensure that already overburdened paramedics do not respond to situations where they are not needed.
City officials say Robert Taylor is one of the busiest areas in the city’s 911 network.
It has the normal injuries-the broken bones and the split lips-that every neighborhood expects. But there’s also overwhelming violence, which means gunshot wounds and stabbings; drugs, which lead to overdoses; and a general lack of preventive health care, which can turn a relatively minor condition like asthma into a major illness.
Plus, the development has Chicago’s worst record of “no-service” calls: false alarms and slight injuries.
“People tend to panic sometimes, especially when it comes to a loved one,” said Cmdr. Elliott Velez, the Fire Department’s coordinator of community services. “But when the paramedics get there, it’ll be something like a scratch and, `Oh, the bleeding stopped.’
“On the paramedic side, you get to the no-service call and find out it wasn’t an emergency, but you still have to fill out the paperwork. Meanwhile, somebody across the street has a serious injury-a heart attack or a massive head injury or a gunshot wound. It’s a possible death because of the misuse of the 911 system.”
Since FACT opened in 1984, its technicians have made more than 14,000 runs, including attending to 400 gunshot wounds and 500 stabbings. They’ve also saved paramedics the time of rushing to 2,000 no-service calls.
The system, which operates around-the-clock every day of the year, is simple and efficient.
Emergency calls from 16 of Robert Taylor’s 28 buildings are passed to Fire Department paramedics and to one of two FACT offices, at 4444 or 4844 S. State St.
The emergency medical technicians, or EMTs, who can stabilize and treat patients but cannot administer drugs, also take walk-in cases and respond to phone calls that come directly from residents.
Once an ambulance arrives, the FACT personnel defer to paramedics.
Chicago officials believe the First Aid Care Team is the only program of its kind in the nation-and it’s been successful enough that a third office will be opened this spring, probably at another public housing development along South State Street.
The concept has created a job that combines the excitement of emergency medical services with the increasingly popular idea of community involvement. Every FACT technician is a current or former Robert Taylor resident-many were previously unemployed or working dead-end jobs-who know the territory better than outside paramedics.
Most continue their education and try to use FACT as a springboard to a job with the Fire Department; eight have become paramedics so far.
The project is funded by a $900,000 federal grant, a sum that covers the proposed third station. That money, administered by the Jane Addams Hull House Association, is used to operate the offices and train the 21 EMTs. Each staff member takes a 16-week course at Malcolm X College.
The dual results, officials hope, are a few more employment opportunities and better medical service.
“When you’ve lived around here, you know what you’re dealing with,” said Smith, 32, who has been a FACT technician since the program began.
“You can come here, and the violence is not a major episode because it happens every day,” she said. “We try not to think about how dangerous it is, because if you do, you won’t be able to do your job. This job is not for everybody, because whatever can happen is going to happen.”
The FACT offices are, in many ways, like any other Robert Taylor apartment. Located on the first floor, the four-room suites are sparsely furnished with several desks, a table and a couch. The technicians spend time watching television, reading, cooking, eating and taking catnaps on old couches and easy chairs. They also study for paramedic exams, play cards, lift weights or just talk.
About the only thing etched in FACT’s daily schedule, aside from the change of shift, is watching “Cops,” a television show that allows viewers to accompany police officers on real calls.
But the numberless red phone, which connects FACT to Englewood Fire Dispatch through a “dedicated land line,” can quickly move the technicians into their own real call.
The injured leg represents a typical run.
A dispatcher tells Smith that a young woman has fallen down some stairs, possibly causing a broken bone.
The four on-duty technicians rush out the office door, down the hallway, past the building’s security guard and through the high-rise’s south entrance. They take an oxygen tank, a bag of supplies and a “stair-chair,” on which they transport patients.
Two things are conspicuous in the 40-yard space between the two high-rises, neither of which seems to bother the EMTs: young lookouts who keep watch for older drug dealers; and bands of older boys planning a night’s work for their gang.
It takes a few good knocks before someone opens the back door at 4500 S. State St. Once inside, the EMTs pass another security guard and make for the elevators, which happen to work on this particular night. Smith said it is not uncommon to climb more than a dozen flights of stairs to an emergency.
The elevator, like almost every public area in Robert Taylor, reeks of garbage and urine. It also is covered in gang graffiti.
The metal box creaks and coughs its way to the 8th floor, where Melvina Barett lives. Barett, 17, is seated at the kitchen table, her leg propped on a chair.
“She fell down the steps between the 5th and 6th floors,” said her mother, Bernice. “She slipped on some beer or water.”
One technician runs oxygen into Barett’s nose to alleviate her shortness of breath-“didn’t want her to have a heart attack on us,” Smith said later. Then the leg is stabilized with cold packs and an air splint, which is blown up like a balloon around the leg.
Barett is carted down to the waiting ambulance, where the paramedics take over. One paramedic tells the technicians to be especially careful because some gang members have fired off several rounds in the last few minutes.
FACT technicians started wearing bulletproof vests about a year ago, mostly because of increased gang activity. No on-duty personnel have been injured so far.
“But they could take a potshot or something,” said George Seanior, 36, who has been an EMT for more than 5 years. “They’ve slowed down gang stuff a lot, but it’s still bad. Sometimes we can’t even go out on calls.”
Still, Seanior said he enjoys-as much as one can “enjoy”-responding to the trauma calls best.
“That’s when you use your skills,” he said, pointing to his head. “That’s when you go over what you know.”
“It’s just when the situation gets hostile, you could get caught in the crossfire,” Smith said, adding that most Robert Taylor residents “know we’re here to help so they don’t bother us much.”
Many residents actually treat FACT like a neighborhood doctor’s office.
At about 7:15 on a recent Saturday evening, several frantic girls race through the door. They say a friend has drunk something bad and is acting “crazy.”
“He said he’s gonna jump out the window,” one girl says.
Smith calls Englewood, telling them to send paramedics and police.
The young man, Paul, is found on the 8th floor. His eyes are bright red, and he’s clearly high, probably on “water,” or PCP, Smith says.
“He was out of it,” she said afterward. “He told me, `Something’s wrong with me.’ “
The next 30 minutes are spent patiently talking Paul down to the 1st floor and out to the ambulance. The paramedics put him in the van, only to have him jump out. Paul angrily declines assistance and runs back to his building.
When the technicians return to their office, a man sipping beer from a 40-ounce bottle tells them a woman had come to the suite with a baby who stuck her finger in an electrical socket. Woman and baby fail to materialize, however, and the technicians catch the end of “Cops.”
The only other action that night came at 9:40, when a mother brought her 12-year-old son to the office with a minor asthma attack.
But the FACT unit had seen some excitement earlier that afternoon: the rare delivery of a baby girl.
“When we got to the building, they told us to hurry because the baby was coming,” EMT Allison Thigpen said. “I only had time to get one glove on because the head was already out.”
The delivery was over before the paramedics arrived.
“This was my third baby,” Thigpen said. “But one came too late, and one didn’t come at all. This is the first time that I’ve actually seen it come out. It was nice, something pleasant.”
