Sharing a shift with Maricopa Fire and Medical Department

Walking into Maricopa Fire and Medical Station 575, I was greeted with an immediate sense of family.

Engineer John Campanaro, firefighters Connor Dignan and James Olderbak, and then-cadet Emily Colhour had gathered in the kitchen to enjoy a hardy lunch.

Captain Josh Eades greeted me and gave me a rundown of what to expect during our ride-along. It was a flexible schedule.

Eades told me not to take photos during medical calls and to be smart about HIPAA laws. If we were called to a crash, I was to stay in the firetruck until I was told otherwise.

The first stop was the engine bay, where Eades, Dignan and Colhour gave me a tour of their toolbox on wheels.

“The thing that we do mostly is EMS, so we run all of the medical calls,” Eades said, “which account for roughly 80% of call volume.”

The truck was filled with tools — some as small as rolls of gauze, others as big as hydraulic clippers.

Dignan and Colhour showed off a few gadgets they use to open an unconscious person’s windpipe. The CPR machine “performs perfect compressions and tracks data,” Eades said. “We’re good at compressions, but this machine, it’s perfect at its job and frees up hands.”

Next came the fire tools, where I got the chance to hold the “jaws of life” — used to remove people from a car crash — and handle firemen’s axes, hoses and fire hydrant adapters, used to connect to neighboring cities’ hydrants because there is no universal thread.

After the tour, the Engine 575 crew jumped into their fire suits and started training. It was a 90-degree day; naturally, they broke quite the sweat as they simulated pulling people out of buildings, sledgehammering and scaling walls, in their 45-pound suits.

They were about to start a hydrant exercise when we were interrupted by our first call of the day. Eades and I, the only two not already in the firetruck, booked it and hopped in.
We put on our headsets and Eades explained we were headed to a reported seizure at Fry’s Marketplace on John Wayne Parkway.

We arrived and filed through the front doors. The firefighters carried large boxes filled with medical equipment up the staircase to the employee breakroom. The injured man complained of back pain, so they called an ambulance, and he was transported to Exceptional Community Hospital.

After the ambulance arrived, we headed back to the fire station — but we didn’t make it far before another call came in. An elderly woman was suffering chest pain in Glennwilde.

We arrived at the home and hurried inside. The woman sat on her couch as firefighters did an electrocardiogram test to see if there were any irregularities in her cardiac cycle. She was transported to a Chandler hospital as a precaution.

Leaving the woman’s home was trickier than I would have predicted. The coolant line split under the truck when we got there, so coolant gushed out of the engine and spilled all over the road.

Engine 575 was immobile until city services arrived and gave us a temporary replacement to get back to the station 30 minutes later.

Eades gave me a final tour of the firehouse, showing me around the dorms and dispatch system, as well as their gym, before I headed back to the InMaricopa office.

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