From EMS Paramedic to Exxon Mobil Emergency Deterrence
Niki Jones, owner of the Niki Jones Agency in Port Jervis, takes a new direction.
A strobe lit barn dance in her small English hometown of Crediton was where Niki Jones’ interest in emergencies began, she said. The pulsing light provoked a grand mal seizure in a student from Jones’s high school.
“A girl in my class knew how to deal with it,” said Jones, and Jones wanted to know too. She thought about becoming a nurse, but, she said, “I was afraid of being stuck indoors. That didn’t have enough excitement.”
She found more excitement in New York City, visiting a friend there, and, at 18, attained a green card. Jones first volunteered on ambulances, then trained to work as an emergency medical technician and then a paramedic.
Her first day on the job, she did mouth-to-mouth respiration on a baby in cardiac arrest with the umbilical cord still attached. She still remembers the terrible taste of the dead baby.
The second call brought her to the apartment of an elderly man, who broke a jam jar while opening it, slit his radial artery and lay unconscious in a pool of blood. He survived.
Later, as a paramedic, Jones worked in EMS across the five New York boroughs for 13 years, ending up at Bellevue Hospital, where the call volume was high.
“Whatever you can dream can happen,” she said.
She encountered mob hits, decomposed bodies, drownings, knifings and much more.
“You run toward trouble, not away. When I talk about it, the memories flood back,” she said. “But I couldn’t be attached at the time. I needed clinical detachment. “
The day in the mid-1980’s when she assisted a man in the Bowery who had hepatitis, tuberculosis and AIDS Jones began making plans to transition out of ambulance work, as she contemplated pregnancy. She worried that caring for the sick could endanger a newborn.
“TB and hepatitis can be contracted through the air. At the time we had no Hazmat protection,” she said.
Protection then was often impromptu for ambulance workers, for instance using an oxygen mask on a contagious person, while hospitals were a more “controlled environment,” Jones said.
Then a Halloween night collision between her ambulance and a tractor-trailer carrying a long I-beam ripped off the top of the ambulance, turning the corner at 14th St. and Park Ave., as Jones was headed to help an unconscious person at a Halloween parade. That left Jones with substantial injuries and hastened the conclusion of her 13 years working for EMS.
She was on disability for a while and went to college. She had a daughter.
“I stumbled on computer-generated graphic design that was easily modified for client portfolios,” she said, as she transitioned to doing crisis management and public relations, often for attorneys, such as Michael Weinstein, in Milford, and the late Ben Ostrer, in Goshen.
Jones had also transitioned out of New York City in search of fresh air when a friend let her use her Milford house. She met Chris Jones, now editor of the Pike County Dispatch, at an Audubon Society event. They married and now live in Port Jervis, where the Niki Jones Agency offices have been on Front St. for twenty-some years.
Recently, a little restlessness, new technology and networking led Jones to a new use for the clinical detachment she called upon for ambulance work.
“Exxon-Mobil was looking for someone to do crisis communications and crisis management. Looking back at my old days as a paramedic, those go hand in hand,” Jones said. “I’m prepared for working in crisis. I’ve put IVs in the jugular vein of an out of control person with a catastrophic injury yelling. Now situations pale in comparison, a moment in time.”
What she offers the executives at Exxon-Mobil, with whom she toured refineries in Texas in July, she said, is a “new software program using data analytics that can be used to apprehend a big event, like an active shooter situation in schools or elsewhere. In a structured environment, the active shooter can be predicted using data-driven insights, plotting data and artificial intelligence like a map or graph and identifying the behaviors associated with risk. You track data without identifying people.”
Then decisions can be made about what to do with the data, such as addressing mental health issues. This AI approach has been used in a Dallas school district, Jones said. The intersection of selected keywords can indicate where more attention would be useful before a large problem arises.
Alex Newman, New American senior editor, and others have expressed concern about privacy invasion with this technological strategy.
However, Jones said, “The program looks at all, not just a select few. It’s not punitive. It’s for problem solving. It can solve for much, including suicidal ideation, before the problem becomes monumental.”
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