A San Francisco woman delivered her baby on the roadside Saturday after gridlock trapped her family car short of the hospital.
Karollyn and her partner, Nate, were threading through Golden Gate Park toward a birthing center when traffic froze solid on Crossover Drive near Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, the San Francisco Fire Department said. Her contractions were already coming hard and fast.
Nate yanked the car onto the shoulder and dialed 911 at roughly 4:30 p.m., but the emergency response collided with the same paralysis gripping every driver that afternoon. The ambulance crew dispatched to help them had to ditch their vehicle blocks away and sprint on foot through the snarl.
What happened next turned potential disaster into a story the couple would later call a stroke of fortune. A doula idling in the identical backup heard what was unfolding and rushed to Karollyn’s window. She coached the laboring mother through the delivery start to finish before any paramedic could fight through to the scene.
“We were so fortunate to have the support that we did, especially some medical professionals that were sitting in the same traffic,” the family said in a statement issued through ambulance company American Medical Response. “Most notably, a doula that helped coach Karollyn through the process until the paramedics arrived.”
By the time Fire Engine 14 and the AMR crew finally reached the shoulder, Karollyn and Nate were already holding their newborn daughter, Cielle Ray, healthy and accounted for.
The couple had once laughed off the cliché of a car birth as something that happened to other people. “We took a route that I take every morning to work without issues,” Nate said, according to AMR. “And just so happens that the day with the worst traffic is the last day we needed it.”
Saturday’s paralysis through the park had roots in a Caltrans resurfacing project that shut a stretch of Highway 101, forcing a river of cars onto 19th Avenue, Park Presidio and the park’s internal roads. A multi-vehicle crash on 19th Avenue near the park’s southern edge turned bad flow into total lockdown.
SFFD spokesperson Capt. Jonathan Baxter confirmed Engine 14’s arrival came after the birth, not before.
The family, in their AMR statement, sounded shaken but grateful for the improvised delivery team the traffic jam had assembled around them.
Caltrans has given no indication it will adjust future weekend closure schedules around obstetric emergencies.