by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Montreal’s most dangerous spot might be miles from the syringe-littered dark alleys full of shadowy, tattooed jailbirds that you’d imagine. The place you might have the least chances of getting out of today alive is full of shiny, well-polished preppies, in the tree-lined suburbs of the West Island.

Heart problems are far more dangerous than the worst street gang. Ticker ailments mail the invite to about 28 per cent of all of the Grim Reaper’s visits. And assuming you’re not buying your illegal drugs in bulk and paying with empty briefcases, your chances of getting murdered in Montreal are almost nil. Less than one per cent of our deaths are homicides.

But your heart could just stop, and when it does, your descent will be faster than Paul Martin after he adopted that Bob-Newhart-in-a-tongue-twister-tournament persona. If help comes within four minutes, your chances of recovering totally from a heart attack are good; after that, brain damage is increasingly likely, and at eight minutes you’re a goner.

It takes up to 18.9 minutes to get an ambulance to parts of the West Island, according to recent numbers made public by West Island MNA Yolande James. Plenty of time to die twice, even.

The Urgences Santé ambulance brass prefers to give general stats, claiming that it takes them nine minutes to arrive at West Island homes. It’s still a killer delay.

Some places have a partial solution. Kirkland, Dollard, Beaconsfield, Pointe Claire, Montreal West, Hampstead, Côte-St-Luc, Outremont and Westmount have First Responders, firemen with 60 hours of training who can usually burn rubber to your home faster than an ambulance.

It makes sense. Firefighters actually work only 15 percent of the time, not including the hours spent spit-polishing their poles. They’re available to speed to your home, defibrillate you, hook you up to an IV and give you aspirin. They’re not full paramedics, common elsewhere, but they can save you with their bag of tricks.

Now the mayor of Montreal has promised to bring these same First Responders to our city. Tremblay is discussing the possibility with the firefighter union, which probably means that it will never happen. But the service is less crucial in the city, where ambulances can sometimes arrive in three minutes.

Montreal’s 80 ambulances rack up seven million kilometres annually, responding to 330,000 calls, and something less than 10 per cent are believed to end up in death.

Ambulance rep André Champagne—he’s supplying most of these wonderful numbers—explains that ambulances take longer to the West Island not because of a covert separatist anti-anglo-suburbanite agenda but rather because ambulances can go 40 days without a call from places like Ste-Anne’s, so they have no reason to linger.

Stand on the corner of Bedford and Côte-des-Neiges, you might see an ambulance pass 300 times a day. Do the same thing in the West Island, and you probably won’t see one.

Also, service is slower out there because distances are greater, ambulances frequently abandon the territory for trips to downtown hospitals and ambulances don’t use MIRTS, the remote control device to turn red lights green.

Speed bumps don’t help. Prince, who lives part-time on Toronto’s Bridal Path, which boasts more man-made humps than Chez Parée, faces a slow and painful ride if he needs an ambulance.

Same goes for Westmount, where Mayor Karin Marks heaped speed bumps all down Lansdowne where she lives.

Here’s a thought. Depanneurs should have defibrillators at the ready. These simple life-saving gizmos cost under a thousand bucks and most citizens are well trained by the 10:59 p.m. beer run to get to their corner store in lightning speed.

So even a penniless refugee living in a cockroach-infested downtown shoebox might get better emergency health services than the moneyed, clean-air-loving middle class. It seems that suburbanites might’ve miscalculated the health perils that come with abandoning the city.

When it comes to living in the burbs, you might ask if your heart is really into it.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca