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Photo by Erin Nelson.
Lt. Brandon Broadhead runs through a simulation with the Homewood Fire Department’s newest automated external defibrillator, or AED, equipment, which is used to help individuals who may experience sudden cardiac arrest.
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Photo by Erin Nelson.
Lt. Brandon Broadhead runs through a simulation with the Homewood Fire Department’s newest automated external defibrillator, or AED, equipment, which is used to help individuals who may experience sudden cardiac arrest.
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Photo by Erin Nelson.
Lt. Brandon Broadhead runs through a simulation with the Homewood Fire Department’s newest automated external defibrillator, or AED, equipment, which is used to help individuals who may experience sudden cardiac arrest.
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Photo courtesy of Charlie Waldrep.
Charlie Waldrep, whose life was saved with the help of an AED, stands with Homewood mayor Scott McBrayer.
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"Chain of Survival"
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Frequently Asked AED Questions.
Charlie Waldrep probably wouldn’t be alive today if he hadn’t been in a building with public access to automated external defibrillators on March 8, 2019.
Waldrep, a longtime Birmingham lawyer who attended law school at Samford University, was at the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport with a boarding pass to New York. He was going to visit his daughter, who had just had a baby.
Waldrep usually takes an early flight, the 6 a.m. nonstop, but this time he was taking the one that departed at 10:30 a.m. He was walking by the airport Chick-fil-A, two carry-on bags in hand, when he collapsed. He was experiencing sudden cardiac cessation.
Mike King, a lawyer from New Jersey, saw Waldrep collapse and began administering CPR. Alex Standish, who was traveling to North Carolina, went to go look for an AED. There were only nine AEDs spread throughout the airport at the time, and when she asked airport personnel, they couldn’t tell her where the nearest one was.
“Think about it — you’ve got the parking deck, you’ve got upstairs and downstairs, you’ve got the concourses,” Waldrep said. “When you think in terms of that, nine is not very many.
“Fortunately, she found one and was able to come back and use it. If there hadn’t been an AED, all of this would’ve been for naught.”
It took 15 to 20 minutes for the paramedics to arrive. By that point, King’s shirt was drenched with sweat as he continued to administer CPR. As Waldrep traveled to the hospital in an ambulance, King and Standish boarded their flights not knowing if Waldrep would survive. But because of their hard work and ability to locate an AED, Waldrep is still alive today and celebrating his first anniversary of survival.
“I tell people I’ve got a new birthday — my biological birthday is Nov. 13, but my new birthday is March 8,” he said. “Because that’s the day that I died and was reborn physically.”
A lot of factors brought Waldrep to the right place at the right time. Had his daughter not had a baby, he wouldn’t have gone to the airport and would have instead been at home, without access to an AED. He’s also glad he took the 10:30 a.m. flight instead of an earlier one.
“Had I done so, this sudden cardiac cessation would have probably occurred in a taxi somewhere in Manhattan instead of being at the airport,” he said. “I would not have survived.”
CARDIAC SOLUTIONS PARTNERS WITH HOMEWOOD
Timing is everything when it comes to using an AED.
“Every minute that it takes for you to get to someone unresponsive, you decrease the chance of survival by 10%,” said John Seale, a Birmingham resident and owner of Cardiac Solutions.
Ideally, he said, this looks like a brisk walk — no running, no stairs — to the AED and back to the patient in three minutes. This will give the patient a 70% chance of survival.
But if AEDs aren’t placed in strategic, accessible locations, it becomes impossible to get back to a patient in under three minutes.
Thomas Becker, who was a 57-year-old employee at Amazon in Joliet, Illinois, suffered a heart attack while on the job in 2017. A lawsuit filed on behalf of his widow, Linda Becker, claims that AED boxes located around the warehouse did not actually have the devices inside. He was unconscious and not breathing by the time EMTs arrived, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Seale said his goal is to build an AED system that reduces the possibility of this type of human error. He will never “just sell a box,” he said. He helps clients find strategic locations to put the AEDs, assists with AED training and implements a system to monitor the AEDs.
AEDs are only required to be checked once a month. But with Seale’s software system at Cardiac Solutions, his clients are checking their AEDs up to 720 times a year.
“Every AED has a status indicator — it’s a little light that’s blinking,” he said. “We’re taking real-time photos of that status indicator. The majority of the AEDs have internal testing, so they’re testing the pads, the batteries. Some do it every day, some do it every week. If that status indicator changes, then our camera system is automatically notified. That tells us right then and there that there’s something wrong with that AED.”
This system helps ensure the AEDs are always in place and that all parts are up to date and working properly.
Homewood has had AEDs in position around the city in government buildings and other public places for the past 15 years or so. But when the city’s AEDs went out of date, Mayor Scott McBrayer decided to partner with Cardiac Solutions to replace all 36 of their AEDs.
Now, Homewood is the first city in Alabama to have this camera monitoring AED system in place.
“It allows for better access in the community,” said Xan Glover with the Homewood Fire Department. “We’ve gone from having the ones that were behind a locked building to where it’s open, it’s available.”
For example, AEDs in parks were typically kept in the concession stands, Glover said. That way they could be protected when unattended.
“But unfortunately, something I’ve noticed, people are in the parks doing stuff all the time when the concession stand isn’t open,” Glover said. “And that does nobody any good.”
With the new system, the city is able to place AEDs in open areas that are accessible to everyone at all times.
“If someone tampered with it, we’d be able to see it,” Glover said. “At the same time, we’d know it was missing as well.”
In the future, Lt. Brandon Broadhead with the Homewood Fire Department said he wants to place more AEDs in more public areas.
“Just right here in front of City Hall — on the weekends, there are hundreds of people between all of the restaurants and everything, and the City Hall building is locked,” he said. “So our goal is to get them out everywhere in the public.”
This includes private companies and Homewood businesses, too. Through the city’s partnership with Cardiac Solutions, Broadhead said companies can purchase AEDs for their buildings at cost.
“When Scott McBrayer and I met, and we did the contract for the city of Homewood, multiple businesses called us and deployed an AED in their establishment,” Seale said. “We have fire extinguishers in every establishment within each city. Why not have an AED?”
The next steps for Homewood include creating public access to AEDs on the Lakeshore Trail. Councilwoman Jennifer Andress said she had many conversations with the late Homewood Fire Chief John Bresnan about this project before his passing.
“He and I rode up and down the Lakeshore Trail on a golf cart trying to identify places where we wanted to have this in the future,” she said. “We were trying to identify which truck comes from what direction, and we wanted to make it accessible enough that if you collapsed, you would be equidistant from a device.”
With an upcoming expansion of the trail, she said, this will be even more important. The timeline for the expansion of AEDs is dependent on funding, Broadhead said.
Waldrep said he is glad Homewood is taking action to spread awareness and access to AEDs.
“It gives me a lot of comfort knowing that my grandchildren, my daughter and my son-in-law who live in Homewood, when they’re using public facilities, that thanks to Mayor McBrayer and City Council, they’re not going to be too far away from an AED,” he said.
When Waldrep first began recovering from his cardiac cessation, he didn’t like talking about it. Now, he wants to spread awareness about the importance of AEDs.
“I try to encourage as many people as I can to have one,” he said. “You never know when you’re going to need it. The life you save may be someone you know personally. I know I would not be here.”
It doesn’t matter how old you are either, he said. Waldrep was 70 when he had his cardiac cessation, but in September, 15-year-old Adaveion Jackson collapsed during high school football practice in Dale County, Alabama. The use of an AED helped save his life, the Dothan Eagle reported.
“You may have an AED, and it’s never used because nobody needed it,” Waldrep said. “But if it is necessary, you certainly want one there.”
He also said you don’t have to have training in order to use it. Standish, the person who used the AED that saved Waldrep’s life, had never used one before. Glover said the AEDs talk you through what to do.
“So even with it being a high-anxiety situation, these AEDs tell you in a calm voice exactly what to do,” he said.
One thing anyone can do is take a look around and locate the nearest AED when out in public, Waldrep said. This knowledge could save someone’s life.
“There is a purpose for me,” he said. “It may be that it’s to talk to people who can help to spread the word about AEDs and why they’re so important.”
