Heat Waves, Booze, and Full Moons

When you come in to work for a shift, you never know what the following 24 hours holds, but the best indicators of how busy your shift is going to be are weather, drinking events, and the moon.

Weather:

How hot or cold a day is determines how busy our shift will be more than any other factor. There’s less crime when it rains, because even criminals don’t want to get wet. If it’s cold, people just stay inside and keep warm, but if it’s hot outside, for some reason, they all go outside and go crazy in the heat. On a hot day we get many more assault calls. Hot days are not only miserable to work in, but they’re outrageously busy. Cold dreary days are awesome. But if it rains too much, then you have a ton more car accidents.

The busiest day in the history of Los Angeles 911 system was September 26^th 2010. That was also the hottest day in the history of Los Angeles with 113 degrees in downtown. This was no coincidence. The entire city went out of its mind, and I worked that day. A call would go out over the radio every two seconds. Every hospital was saturated. It was non-stop all day. People were dropping in the streets. Los Angeles slipped into a deeper circle of hell that day and I had the busiest shift of my life.

Booze:

The longer I live, the more I am convinced alcohol actually is the devil’s urine. Intoxication is a precursor to so many different types of calls. And drunken patients are the worst to deal with. Drinking holidays are our busiest days of the year. New Year’s Eve is our busiest night followed closely by Halloween.

But the worst by far is the 4^th of July, usually the busiest 911 day of the year. Here’s why: People are traveling, so more car accidents. It’s hot, so people go crazy. There are barbeques and parties, so people are drinking. It goes day and night, …and, oh yeah, THERE ARE FIREWORKS. As if people weren’t dumb enough when drunk, now we give them explosives.

Traveling+Heat+Drinking+Explosives=EMTs hating their lives.

The best chill days to work are non-drinking holidays where people have the day off work, but they don’t go out celebrating, like Veterans Day, or Memorial Day, or MLK day. God, do I love MLK day.

The Moon:

If it’s a full moon, it’s going to be a busy night. I don’t know what it is, but full moons make people go crazy. You may think this is all astrology BS, but it’s not. Multiple times I’ve been in the rig and the moment a full moon comes over the horizon I hear all these calls go out over the radio. It’s nuts. And it’s everything; car crashes, assaults, difficulty breathing, you name it. It was a full moon when I got the gun shot wound to the head traumatic full arrest, my craziest call ever.

A co-worker once put it to me like this: Our brains tightly float in water and if the moon has enough gravitational pull to move the entire ocean tide, it must have enough pull on our brains to slightly through some people off, creating the increase in crime and weird events.

How many people have emergencies in a day is organic and can never be truly predicted, but the weather, alcohol, and the moon are strong indicators whether or not you’re going to get worked.