In February I went down to Clarksdale, Mississippi to take a documentary film making workshop presented by Barefoot Workshops. We had 4 very talented instructors and one of them was Julie Winokur. Julie recently launched a website for her documentary FIRESTORM, a film focused on the Los Angles Fire Department indirectly forced to handle the immense amount of medical-related emergencies due to inadequate facilities in LA.

“Every minute in the United States, an ambulance gets turned away from an emergency room because hospitals are simply too full. In Los Angeles, where the wait time in some ERs is as long as 48 hours, the entire 911 system is being challenged in ways that are alarming.

FIRESTORM follows Los Angeles Fire Department Station 65, located in South Los Angeles, a neighborhood with a largely uninsured and undereducated population. The LAFD handles all emergency medical services for the city of Los Angeles, and currently 82% of the department’s work is medical, rather than fire-related. Eleven hospitals have closed in just five years in LA, and the challenge of delivering more than 500 patients per day to a shrinking number of hospitals is overwhelming to the LAFD. With resources strained, and 911 being used for everything from heart attacks to stomach aches, LAFD paramedics have become virtual ‘doctors in a box’.”

“Joe Dwyer, who had died so lonely and miserably, was an American hero. In March 2003, the front pages of newspapers across America featured a photo of Dwyer carrying a small Iraqi boy to safety shortly after a firefight. “It was the image of war that everyone wanted to see,” says Warren Zinn, the photographer who took the picture. It was also the image that America wanted the rest of the world to see: a brave, compassionate US soldier doing something helpful and acting with the best of intentions in the Middle East. It just might be, however, that Joe Dwyer didn’t outlive the war in Iraq precisely because he actually was the way America wanted to be seen.”

As Joerg said, if you only have time to read one article today, this is the one.

photo credit: AP / Warren Zinn, The Army Times

Wonderful story here about a boy with autism and his life-changing experiences with horses.

NY Times article here with the photograph below.

Erin Trieb for The New York Times