ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – The Anchorage Fire Department invited community members to take part in their FireOps 101 training, giving participants a firsthand look at the work firefighters do every shift.
Each participant was paired with a firefighter to shadow them throughout the day, as they moved between four rotations: CPR, second-story window rescue, car extraction and engine basics with fighting a real fire.
Training starts with medical calls
Sean McMillan, Anchorage Firefighter and EMT, said the daily EMS calls firefighters run are the department’s bread and butter. He said the department responds to about 50,000 calls a year in the Anchorage Bowl, with about 35,000 of those being EMS calls. Roughly 350 of those calls a year are cardiac arrests.
“This is the point of this whole exercise is to help you guys understand that we need a lot of things to do what we do,” McMillan said, taking participants through an EMS call simulation…