DARBY — A new lifeline was installed at the Darby Community Public Library on Wednesday. Now, there is a small, white box in the library lobby that could literally save a life.
“This is one of 29 AEDs, automated external defibrillators, the hardest word in the world to say, that we're installing in libraries that wanted an AED, but didn't have one,” said Bruce Newell, with The Trust for Montana Libraries.
Newell is on a roadtrip across the state, bringing AEDs and other emergency first aid supplies to libraries in rural areas and big cities. Wednesday, he stopped in Philipsburg, Darby and Hamilton.
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“I’m about 2/3 of the way through installing them around the state,” he said. “Tomorrow, I go as far as Hot Springs. Next week, I go as far as Miles City, and then we'll be done.”
In a practiced, quick way, he drilled the defibrillator box into the wall.
“It's just a great way of restarting a heart that had stopped doing its job,” Newell said of the AED. “When your heart stops, every minute decreases the chance of survival by 10%. So, even if the fire department's across the street or just a couple of blocks away, it's good to have an AED there.”
Inside the boxes, each library is getting an AED, along with additional padding sized for children, a few doses of Narcan, a nasally-administered drug that counteracts opioid overdoses, and a “Stop-the-Bleed” kit, full of gauze and tourniquets.
“In addition to the getting the stuff, the librarians are getting training, so that they know how to use the stuff, so that libraries become safer, kind of shared living rooms for the community,” Newell said.
AEDs and training can be expensive. The Trust, a nonprofit, works to support Montana libraries. For this project, which Newell said cost about $40,000, funds for the supplies and training came from the Montana Opioid Abatement Trust, the American Red Cross of Montana, Riverstone Health of Billings and other private donors and groups across the state.
“A lot of libraries are struggling to buy books and to keep open for hours, and they just hadn't got around to getting an AED,” he said. “It's pretty terrific touring libraries, seeing how Montana libraries knock themselves out doing really, really hard stuff with often too few resources to provide excellent library services for the community. And I think this is an example of that.”
