Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Ready to respond

It was 8:54 on a Friday night, and Clark County firefighter Mike Courtney walked up to the drooling man who was missing a nose and calmly asked him the name of the president of the United States.

"Bush," 53-year-old John Terry answered from his wooden chair on the front porch of a house on Vegas Valley Drive.

"We're just checking if you're OK," Courtney told Terry.

Terry told Courtney that he had shot himself in the face five years ago. His face had largely healed, but he no longer has a nose and he drools constantly.

Courtney and his partner, Pat Foley, both 35, had been working since 8 a.m.

As paramedic firefighters with Station 18, the busiest station in the Las Vegas Valley, they respond to traffic collisions, fights among drunken tourists on the Strip, elderly people who are ill, and gunshot and stabbing victims throughout the course of an average 24-hour shift.

Earlier in the day they scattered cat litter on roads to soak up leaking oil after a two-car collision, helped stabilize a security guard who was in a bicycle accident and likely saved the life of a man who was apparently having a stroke -- and they still had another 12 hours left before they could call it a night.

Most of the calls handled by Foley and his counterparts at Station 18 are not the type of emergency calls people usually associate with firefighters. Courtney and Foley don't spend their shifts running into burning buildings. They don't even ride in a fire engine.

In general, most of the calls the fire department responds to are not fire-related.

In 2004 the Clark County Fire Department responded to 99,343 incidents. Only 3,615 were for fires. More than 72,000 calls were medical emergencies, and the remaining 23,000 were technical rescues or false alarms, according to the fire department.

Take John Terry for example. Terry's roommates at the veteran's residential home had called 911 just minutes earlier to report that Terry was acting oddly, and the fire department responded to the call.

"Do you know where you are?" Courtney asked.

"Las Vegas," he replied.

"What year is it?"

"2005."

Terry's roommates had urged him to go to the hospital, but he refused.

"All I do is smoke. I don't bother anybody," Terry told the firefighters.

"We're more afraid of what he could do," 67-year-old Tom Fornier said.

After Courtney checked Terry's vital signs, he got up to leave.

"He's of sound mind," he told Fornier and Terry's other roommates. "We're kind of bound by the fact that he's a grown man."

Courtney and Foley then headed back to Station 18 for the first time in more than 2 1/2 hours of running from call to call.

In 2004 Station 18, on Flamingo Road near Paradise Road, responded to 21,734 incidents, according to the Clark County Fire Department's annual report. That's more than twice as many runs as their counterparts at the second busiest station, Station 15, at Valley View Boulevard and Spring Mountain Road. That station's total for the year was 9,147.

One reason Station 18 stays so busy is it is responsible for handling 911 calls on the Las Vegas Strip. Firefighters from Station 18 were some of the first responders to arrive at the scene of the vehicle rush-hour incident involving Stephen Ressa, the California man who drove down a sidewalk on the Strip on Sept. 21. Three people were killed in the incident and more than 10 were hospitalized.

In that case Station 18's crews were dispatched at 5:19 p.m. and got to the people who had been mowed down on the sidewalk between Bally's and Paris Las Vegas at 5:24 p.m., despite rush-hour traffic.

Most of the incidents on the Strip are not nearly as dramatic, said Ryan Orton, 24, another firefighter at Station 18.

Most firefighters would rather not be assigned to 18 because of the high volume of calls, Orton said.

But Orton and others who work there said they enjoy the wide variety of situations with which they deal, including the many calls that involve tourists from throughout the world.

The firefighters at Station 18 do not receive any special public relations training for dealing with tourists, said Bob McBride, a captain at Station 18.

"From day one in rookie school, we are taught to be respectful of everyone. We afford it to residents and visitors," he said. "Everyone gets that training."

The firefighters work 24-hour shifts about every other day. The station has a dormitory for the firefighters to sleep in, a workout room, an entertainment room with a large-screen television and large kitchen in which several firefighters cook a full meal for 17 firefighters, as is typical of fire departments across the country.

During what little time they do spend back at Station 18, firefighters fill out incident reports for each call they received, lift weights in the workout room, try to catch a few minutes of sleep before the next call or watch television to unwind.

At 4:48 p.m. that Friday, Courtney and Foley received a call from dispatch that there was a woman who passed out at Paris Las Vegas.

The regular Friday afternoon rush hour was already under way, and Foley maneuvered the ambulance down Flamingo Road around a long line of vehicles stopped at a traffic light on Paradise. The traffic was bumper to bumper, so Foley drove over a curb and sped down Flamingo Road into oncoming traffic that had mostly pulled over to the side of the road.

With sirens still blaring, Foley pulled up to Paris Las Vegas. People walking on the Strip stared at the ambulance and covered their ears. Foley parked the ambulance in the valet and limousine parking area and walked into the hotel at 4:53 p.m.

Courtney and Foley walked at a brisk pace through the hotel lobby and into the maze of slot machines, where they found an elderly tourist from the Netherlands sitting at a Neptune's Kingdom slot machine with a man sitting next to her.

"My wife -- she was drinking two glasses of wine," the man said, explaining why his wife, who didn't speak English, had passed out on the floor of the casino.

The firefighters gave the woman an electrocardiogram test to check her heart and also checked her other vital signs. A handful of onlookers were curious about what was going on, but most people nearby just kept playing the slot machines.

The woman who fainted told the firefighters, through her husband, that she didn't want to be taken to the hospital, and so Courtney and Foley left the scene at 5:03 p.m.

But there was little time to rest, even during the brief drive back to the station. The firefighters came upon a fender-bender as they were driving back to Station 18, and stopped in the middle of Flamingo to check it out at 5:15 p.m.

"I'm not even going to make my bed on a Friday or Saturday night if I'm riding rescue. What's the point?" Courtney said.

No one was hurt in the collision, but the two drivers wanted a police officer to come to the scene. The firefighters called for Metro Police to come to the scene but were told it would take at least two hours before an officer could respond to the minor incident.

Courtney advised the drivers to exchange insurance information and then left the accident scene.

"Eighty percent of this job is just communication," he said.

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