New neighborhoods popping up in Lubbock help expand the city, but creates challenges for first-responders, who have larger areas to cover.
Lubbock is growing tremendously fast,” said Jerin Tyler, Communication Chief for University Medical Center Emergency Medical Services. “Especially South and Southwest Lubbock. You’ve got a lot of area where there is new houses popping up, new neighborhoods.”
Tyler said the digital map systems used by first-responders who drive ambulances was a combination of data from Tom-Tom, Bing, and Google Maps services.
“There is stuff that is constantly changing inside the technology that we use and it’s very difficult to keep up because a lot of times technology is way farther advanced but in this case, we’re growing faster than technology can meet up with us,” he explained.
Kassie Morgan, a South Lubbock resident, said when a family member of hers had an emergency, crews had a difficult time finding her home, as the mapping technology had not updated Lubbock’s Springfield neighborhood into the system.
“Any fire department, any police department, should be 100 percent confident as in their location. As, what streets go through, what doesn’t go through, where places are. For the simple fact of their safety, our safety, and faster response time,” she said.
“What if that was my mom who just had a heart attack or something? We would want to get that under control faster. And if there’s any way we can get a faster response, we would want that,” Morgan added.
Tyler said EMS crews responded to roughly 44,000 calls last year.
“On a day to day basis it just depends. Some days we’ll have 120, some days we’ll have 90, some days we’ll have 150 it’s just kind of an up and down,” he explained. “We have about 87 percent wireless calls.”
He said dispatchers and drivers rely on the navigation software, but at the end of the day, they rely on common sense.
“I think in the future, hopefully they will have a better way to get everything quicker but its a work in progress and i think with the way the city is growing its going to continue to be that way. Just the more information that we have to find you, the better,” Tyler said.
