On a college campus, a student carrying a pager wouldn't raise many eyebrows. Billy Haley doesn't use his pager to stay in touch with friends or family. When his pager rings, it means he could be rushing to a house fire or car accident. Each month, he responds to several dozen of these pages - assuming he isn't in the middle of a class.
While growing up in Harrison, New York, Billy had no experience in emergency services; simple curiosity led him to attend a meeting at the Clinton Fire Department during his sophomore year. Soon after, he began going out on calls to learn the technical side of responding to medical emergencies and training for disasters.
According to Billy, the department handles between 45 and 75 calls each month, and about 70 percent of those calls are medical situations. With this in mind, he completed an emergency medical services course, and earned his EMT card during his junior year.
When it came time to design a senior project, Billy thought back to his internship with the Westchester County Department of Emergency Services. He spent the summer between his junior and senior years working with governmental agencies on communications, disaster management and evacuation planning.
He drew on this experience to investigate response times of emergency agencies in Westchester County. "The services there are fragmented, with more than 50 different services, and each town has its own ambulance corps," Billy says. "It took me a week to collect all the data from eight different agencies."
Billy will look at how population, population density, income and age impact the speed of emergency crew responses, taking into account whether the crews belong to public, private, non-profit, and volunteer agencies. His goal is to recommend more efficient ways of allocating public safety resources.
As a double major in public policy and economics, Billy will pursue a career in disaster management and planning, and plans to continue volunteering with local emergency agencies.
