Chris Christie’s political bridge closure delayed emergency response vehicles

 As America’s Watchtower reported just a little while ago it appears as if aides and political appointees of Chris Christie blocked all but one lane of the George Washington Bridge in an effort to punish a political opponent.

  A Barack Obama-like Chris Christie claimed he was unaware about what his aides were doing, but I do not believe him. Because the bridge was all but shut down with no notice emergency response teams were caught unawares and did not seek alternate routes. According to this article this led to a delay and the emergency response teams were not able to reach at least four people in the timely manner they were accustomed to, in some cases actually doubling the response time–one woman eventually died.

Emergency responders were delayed in attending to four medical situations – including one in which a 91-year-old woman lay unconscious – due to traffic gridlock caused by unannounced closures of access lanes to the George Washington Bridge, according to the head of the borough’s EMS department.

The woman later died, borough records show.

In at least two of those instances, response time doubled, noted EMS coordinator Paul Favia, who documented those cases in a Sept. 10 letter to Mayor Mark Sokolich, which The Record obtained.

On Sept. 9, the first day of the traffic paralysis, EMS crews took seven to nine minutes to arrive at the scene of a vehicle accident where four people were injured, when the response time should have been less than four minutes, he wrote.

It also took EMS seven minutes to reach an unconscious 91-year-old woman who later died of cardiac arrest at a hospital. Although he did not say her death was directly caused by the delays, Favia noted that “paramedics were delayed due to heavy traffic on Fort Lee Road and had to meet the ambulance en-route to the hospital instead of on the scene.”

Emergency responders also were late in getting to a third medical emergency that first morning of the lane closures. It took Favia nearly an hour to arrive at a building where a person was experiencing chest pains “due to standstill traffic on Route 46 East. The Mutual Aid ambulance coming from Palisades Park and paramedics coming out of Leonia were also delayed due to the excessive traffic,” he wrote.

Delays in emergency response times continued the next morning when a call that should have taken three or four minutes to respond to took seven, Favia wrote. In that instance, a man was experiencing chest pains.

  At this point it is unclear whether or not the dead woman would have lived if the response team made it to her in a timely manner, but it certainly did not help; this is what happens when people put personal political gain ahead of everything else–they simply do not think through all of the possible ramifications of their actions because they are blinded in their effort to seek what they consider to be political glory.

  Chris Christie can deny knowledge of this all that he wants but it does not relieve him of the fact that he showed an extreme lack of judgement in hiring people who obviously put politics ahead of the welfare of the people they are charged with protecting, and in my opinion this alone disqualifies him from the office he seeks.