Thursday, January 17, 2008
My Hero
One of the rooms (our computer room) in our new house has some strange acoustics. For whatever reason sounds from certain areas outside are much louder in this room that anywhere else, including outside. For example, when they are plowing snow on the highway (about .6 miles away) it often sounds like the plow is right outside the window. Same with a local dog. You can't hear it bark from any other room and can hardly hear it from outside the house, yet it comes in clear in the computer room. I think part of if may be the way the gable vent is situated and another might be the fact that there is an almost completely clear corridor from the computer room window to the highway (tracing it out on Google earth).
Anyway, the important thing in this story is that the other day my wife was in the computer room when she heard someone yelling for help. She first looked to see if it was the radio or TV, then looked out all the windows around our house. She thought it was kids playing. Finally she put her coat on (it was about 24F yesterday) and went outside to see what was going on. It turned out that the grandmother of the neighbors across the street had fallen on the ice and couldn't get up. She had been yelling for help for almost a half-hour. My wife managed to help them out getting her up and on her feet, by contacting the daughter and another neighbor. I'm not saying someone wouldn't have heard her sooner or later, but my wife sure helped shorten the time and get things helped out.
Her daughter in the house the grandmother was just outside of couldn't hear her and neither could the neighbor right next door who was home; but my wife across the street in the house sitting in front of computer with a fan running could. These aren't cheek-by-jowl city houses either. There are two large lawns and vehicles and a street between our two houses.
My wife doesn't think she did too much, but she easily could have saved the lady from getting frostbite or even freezing to death. An older woman on the ground in sub-freezing weather doesn't really have a lot of time.
