Kitty and Peter Dwyer. (Photo by Fern Shen)

by FERN SHEN
The Hampden heart attack victim rescued in the blizzard by Baltimore city paramedics who strapped him to a child’s inflatable sled had nothing but praise today for his rescuers.

“They saved my life,” said Peter Dwyer, 59, interviewed outside his home on Ash Street, back from his three-day stay at Union Memorial Hospital.

But Dwyer, whose unplowed street had been impossible for his rescuers to reach by ambulance, criticized the government’s snow-clearing efforts and said he was especially irked by Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley’s remarks chiding citizen complainers.

“I can’t believe we’ve got a governor and he says ‘Will the people stop whining!’” Dwyer said.

He was referring to O’Malley’s remarks in the aftermath of the second part of the blizzard, when he said in a news conference: “Stop already with the ‘Scrape my street down to the pavement.’ That cannot happen for the next 72 hours.”

Dwyer said it was obvious that the city was overwhelmed by the snow and that the state could have done much more to help local efforts to clean up narrow streets, for ambulances and everyone else.

“They should have had a plow to go with those ambulances, that’s what they used to have,” said Dwyer who has lived in Hampden for years. “Instead, now you got ambulances stuck in the snow, two fire trucks stuck in the snow. And dump trucks sitting up on 83 doing nothing. I saw it.”

Dwyer said his neighbors did all the street clearing themselves when no plows arrived to push away the heavy snow that fell last weekend. “This neighborhood,” he said proudly, “we stick together.” A plow arrived on Thursday on Ash Street, he said, “but it went about half-way up the street and got stuck.”

Chest pains

Dwyer said he first felt the chest pains and broke out into a sweat when he was shoveling snow last Saturday at about 4 pm, in the aftermath of the first part of the blizzard. Dwyer knew what the symptoms meant — he has a history of heart problems, multiple bypassess and other surgeries and has an implanted defiibrillator. He’s not supposed to exert himelf.

“But I had to shovel,” he said. “I couldn’t get out my door, there was so much snow.”

The ambulance made as far as Union Street. (Photo by Sean Bowie)

When the paramedics arrived via Union Street, they got to the bottom of the hill but couldn’t turn up Ash Street because of the more-than-knee-deep snow. Instead they waded through the deep snow to Dwyer’s house (about two tenths of a mile) and had to figure out a way to get him to the ambulance. “They said ‘we can’t bring a gurney up here,’” Dwyer recalled.

So they borrowed the orange-and-blue inflatable rubber snowsled from the little girl across the street, strapped him to it and dragged him out.

“I was afraid they were going to have a heart attack,” Dwyer said. “It was tough going.”

Paramedics pull Dwyer by sled. (Photo by Sean Bowie.)