Erik Holt

It's like, I can't breathe.

18 minutes later, somebody would arrive.

And for that particular department at the time, you might not even get an EMT that shows up and says, I can help you breathe again.

Was that a manpower issue?

I think it was a...

small town that had a hard time transitioning, right, and professionalizing.

I come from a very professional world.

I mean, my guys at Fort Carson are just studs still, right?

I mean, we operated at the tip of the spear, I like to say, in firefighting.

And going into a small town department, I said, I live here too.

You know, if my kids need 911 and I'm out of the area, I want the best showing up.

And so 18 minutes is a long road to hell.

Yeah.

Especially like hold your breath.

Yeah.

I mean, so the, you know, the model of volunteer fire department is like, we'll respond from home to the station from the station.

We'll wait for people to get there and then go out.

And I kind of changed that model to where we always had somebody 24 seven at the station that was an EMT.

And so, you know,

I started in April of 2022 and by January of 23, we were down to a seven minute response time by just changing the model.