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Northshore Fire receives new life-saving equipment from lottery winners
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – A local couple has shared some of their good fortune with Northshore Fire Protection District, making it possible for the district to purchase new life-saving equipment first put to use last week.
Last September, Tony Velasquez of Clearlake Oaks, a retired local postmaster, won $14 million in the California State Lottery, as Lake County News has reported.
Velasquez and wife, Joy, quickly got to work looking for ways to help their community.
They approached Northshore Fire late last year about making a donation to purchase two new heart monitors for the district’s Lucerne and Clearlake Oaks stations, according to Chrissy Pittman, a Northshore Fire firefighter/paramedic.
Pittman said the district immediately set up a meeting with its local sales representative from Zoll Medical to preview their newest available monitor defibrillators for the field. The next day they had a demonstration of the two models that were available for field use and decided to purchase two of the X Series monitors, which is the newest model.
“The X Series was originally developed for air-medical use and is built to be durable and work well under conditions that we work in, in addition being used on bumpy roads and in less than ideal working conditions such as low light,” Pittman said.
She said they received the new monitors the last week of March and had an in-service training on April 2, with the devices going into service later that day.
Pittman said the district received $57,000 to purchase the two new monitors. The actual purchase price was over $69,000 but they were able to trade in two of their older heart monitors, one being very old and outdated.
The new monitors have the ability to transmit, with the touch of a button, a full 12-lead EKG to both of the base hospitals and to any facility where they may fly patients, Pittman said.
They had this technology with their five-year-old heart monitors but the process was cumbersome and completely dependent on the ability to receive a full cell phone signal for several minutes, which is not always possible in many areas of the district, Pittman said. The new technology requires only to receive a short time of WiFi signal, enough to send a text message, and the information can be sent.
Another new feature of these new monitors is the capability to monitor carbon monoxide levels by applying a simple probe to the end of a finger. This technology has previously been much too expensive for field use, she said.
Pittman said the district plans to require that each of its firefighters who has been working a fire be monitored for carbon monoxide poisoning while rehabbing during the incident and before leaving the scene to return to their stations.
“Every year firefighters die after returned to their station from a working structure fire due to carbon monoxide poisoning,” she said. “They may have symptoms easily dismissed as fatigue from working hard at the fire, go to bed for the evening and never wake up. Now, something simple and noninvasive can prevent such tragedies, no only with firefighters and first-responders, but also fire victims who may have no burn injuries and feel like they don't need to go to the hospital but really need treatment for carbon monoxide poisoning.”
Pittman said the devices also have a built-in CPR feedback feature that gives on-screen feedback to the person doing CPR. It shows whether they are achieving appropriate rate and depth of compressions and offers the ability to see not only the compressions on the EKG but also the baseline of what the heart is actually doing on its own without stopping CPR to check.
On April 10, the district used the new monitor from the Lucerne station to diagnose a heart attack in a patient in Nice, Pittman said.
As a result, paramedics were able to contact Sutter Lakeside with their findings, consult with the emergency room, and agreed to fly the patient directly from the field to St. Helena main campus to their cath lab. Pittman said it helped them get the patient from the field to the cath lab in less than an hour.
“Time is muscle in the case of the heart and the faster the patient reaches definitive care, the less damage to the heart and the better the outcome,” she said. “We cannot be more excited about what we are able to offer our patients.”
Pittman said the district is very grateful to the Velasquez family for their generosity.
“We cannot thank them enough for what they have given to the community,” she said. “Approximately 85 percent of our calls are medical related, and we use the heart monitor on at least 80 percent of those calls, so its an invaluable piece of life-saving equipment.”