Who does the Rescue work where you are

[tunnelrat83]

Hey just currious... who runs the Squad Trucks Where you are... just currious about this one.

[THE_DITCH_DOCTOR]

The fire department does everything here (rescue, EMS, and fire suppression).

[tunnelrat83]

USAF, does everyone have to cross train or is it u do which you want?

[VillageEMT]

All of our EMS people belong to one of the fire companies, but many have not functioned as firefighters for years. The Rescue unit is Company 2 AKA "Susquehanna Hose Company". Tradition plays a big part in our dept.

We beat the chiefs to a house fire recently and got to call in "smoke showing." Then we had to pull hose from the first responding engine because it only carries two people. It's the first time I've done anything as a firefighter in 6 months. Then we stood back and just did rehab as needed. More than 90% of our calls are EMS only calls.

[Alcomedicism]

Our Fire Dept and Rescue squad here are in the same house, so I guess the FD does the rescue work. But we also have a dive specialty team too.

-Dixie

[THE_DITCH_DOCTOR]

USAF, does everyone have to cross train or is it u do which you want?

Well, we prefer everyone to cross train but we will normally take any volunteer we can get. Now, if you want to be a firefighter, you have to be an EMT, but you can be an EMT without being a firefighter. This is because of the shortage of people. Everyone on our department at this point (with the exception of one of our EMT's who just got done going through chemotherapy) is cross trained.

But because we are all volunteer we have people who don't want to do medical or trauma calls that will simply not respond if it's an EMS call (and will not put themselves down for call time on the ambulance which is the only piece of apparatus that we try to make sure we have staffing for), but will be the first out the door when a fire or tech rescue call comes in. Now technically they aren't supposed to do this, but we really can't stop it from happening.

BTW 92% of our calls last year were for EMS and only 4% were actually "working" structure fires.

[Summit]

Extrication + Fire + Wildland = vFD

EMS = EMS

Rope rescue = SAR, Water Rescue, vFD

[emtI4now]

Our volunteer fire department does our extrication/rescue stuff. We also have a county unit in a nearby town that we can call out also.

THANK GOD for fire fighters.

[grnresqjeep]

At this time our local fire depts do most of our light extrication, everything else is done by neighboring towns.

[ambogrl]

FD= Fire suppression, Cut & Rescue, First Responder Emt's, Only transport in rural areas

EMS= Simple (no cutting) Extrication, ALS & BLS transport