Homewood expands AED program to Lakeshore Trail, police officers, schools

Thus far in 2020, approximately 20 Alabamian lives have been saved because someone was able to get there in time with one of Cardiac Solutions’ automated external defibrillators.

As the city of Homewood expands its AED program across the city, one of those lives saved could eventually be you or one of your friends.

As we reported in March, the city replaced all 36 of its AEDs with Cardiac Solutions’ devices and had plans to begin installing them in more public places. The city added three new public AEDs to its collection Aug. 7 when local resident Sid Warren, 16, installed the devices on the Shades Creek Greenway trail for an Eagle Scout project.

Warren grew up biking on the trail, running with his dad there and hiking there with his family, he said. Now that he’s on the cross country team with Homewood High School, he’s on the greenway trail five days a week. He also enjoys mountain biking and trains on the trail, so he said he uses the trail all year long.

Warren has been in Boy Scouts since he was 11. When he started looking for ideas for his Eagle Scout project, he began talking to Xan Glover with the Homewood Fire Department about placing AEDs on the trail.

“He said that the Homewood Fire Department had been thinking about doing that for a while, and he thought he could get a couple more (AEDs) donated,” Warren said. “From there, the project really got on its feet, and we worked together to get it approved by the City Council.”

Each station comes with the AED, a camera monitoring system and a weatherproof box. The camera monitoring system has an indicator light that alerts the city if any parts of the device are damaged or need updating. This system ensures that a pedestrian in an emergency will never arrive at a broken or misplaced AED. The total cost of donated equipment was about $6,000,said Jon Seale of Cardiac Solutions.

Together with some younger Boy Scouts, Warren installed three AEDs over the 2.6-mile greenway trail. They also marked the trail with orange spray-painted letters to help pedestrians locate the AEDs. The installation took two days to complete, and Warren said the process was exciting.

“Especially on that last one, I was just like, ‘Yes! We got this done,’” he said. “It was awesome to see from all the emails, phone calls and presentations to getting it actually installed and accessible to all the people on the trail.”

The trail’s bookends each have one AED installed there, and there is also an AED in the middle of the trail near the high school entrance. This means that a pedestrian in an emergency is never more than 0.75 miles away from the nearest AED device.

“It’s an added safety measure for the trail and will help in case of emergency, which we hope will never happen,” Warren said. “They’ll be there so people can get there faster.”

Within two weeks of Warren installing the devices, the Homewood Fire Department responded to a call on the greenway trail — a bystander used the device on an unresponsive pedestrian and saved that person’s life.

Seale said that in the event of a cardiac arrest, every minute counts.

“As good as the fire and EMS is — and they’re good, very good — it’s just hard for anyone to be at a scene of an event within three minutes drop-to-shock,” he said. “Every minute that it takes you to get to someone unresponsive, it decreases the chances of survival by 10%.

“If you’re walking on the trail and someone goes down and is unresponsive, there’s an AED that’s going to be close by and clearly identified. They can go ahead and administer therapy since the unit walks them through the entire process. ... There is a lot of what I call ‘first responding’ that we can do as individuals instead of putting all of the responsibility on fire and EMS.”

Up next for the city of Homewood, Cardiac Solutions is working with the police department and the schools to install 80 new AED devices. There will be 60 new devices total across the Homewood Police Department patrol cars, and there will be 20 new AEDs total installed across all of Homewood’s public schools.