AHS launches independent review into fatal dog mauling response
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
196.06047
Summary
A woman was mauled to death by three loose dogs in her backyard. Why did these dogs get loose? What happened to make them loose? And why did it take so long for an ambulance to get to this woman?
Transcript
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why? Why were those three dogs unrestrained? How did they get loose? What background was there
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with the owner with those dogs? I mean, I've got three dogs at home as well, one we're fostering
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and a couple we've adopted. And I'm pretty sure if those three goofballs got loose, all they would
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do is slobber on somebody, maybe dig up their garden and the one dog might do something nasty
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to somebody's leg, but they wouldn't get in and kill somebody like those three dogs did the other
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day. It's tragic. They went out of control. So let's investigate, not go knee jerk with this and
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try to figure out how to stop these sorts of things from happening. That was just horrible. Just a
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terrible tragedy. The other part, of course, is that incident happened 10 minutes, nine minutes
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drive in a regular car from the largest hospital in Alberta. And it took half an hour for an ambulance
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to get to this poor woman as she died in the backyard. And now what I'm really getting worried
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about is the constantly changing story because Alberta Health Services has gone into defense
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mode and they're making excuses for this. And they're saying, oh, it was a dispatch problem.
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And we didn't realize that it was a life-threatening situation. I mean, the neighbor who stood there,
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I've heard on the interviews and we've listened to him on TV, breaking down that poor man who's
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known that lady for years, came out and found this incident and phoned 911. And you're trying
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to tell me that he came across an 86-year-old woman who'd been mauled by three dogs to what
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turned out to be death and phoned 911 and said, I think we just need police. We don't need an
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ambulance. I'm finding this very hard to believe. You know, if this was the United States, one of the
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things they do down there is release 911 calls. I'd really like to hear what was actually said during
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that call. I mean, perhaps, I don't know, a person's in panic. They're afraid. Maybe he wasn't
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clear on what was required, but something went terribly wrong. Half an hour to a woman in that
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condition for an ambulance to even arrive. She could very possibly be alive today, you know, had we not
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done something about it. And even if that didn't have anything to do with this particular case,
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we've got some very serious problems with our emergency services. We've been hitting code reds all the time.