Whitefish firefighter hailed as hero
Whitefish firefighter Ben Parsons looks out the window of a fire truck as he returns to the Whitefish Emergency Services Center after responding to a call Monday morning. Parsons is scheduled to be laid off from the fire department July 31.
A Whitefish firefighter who had just finished a grueling mountain-bike endurance race in Oregon found himself in an unusual spot afterwards — saving another firefighter’s life.
Ben Parsons, 30, a full-time firefighter and paramedic for the Whitefish Fire Department, traveled to Blodgett, Ore., for the annual Test of Endurance race on Father’s Day.
He finished strong at the race (11th out of 240 racers on the 50-mile course with 8,200 feet of climbing) and was headed back to his truck to clean up when a friend noticed flames “licking up uncomfortably close” to the awning of a nearby home.
They quickly discovered a flaming barbecue grill sitting on a wood porch attached to the house.
“Unbelievably, there was no one home and no hoses in the yard,” Parsons recalled in a first-person account he wrote about the incident, so he told his friend to run up the street where a firefighter with the Blodgett Volunteer Fire Department was operating a tender for racers to clean up their bikes.
Parsons said he grudgingly called 911, “knowing that we’d most likely get this taken care of before another engine showed up.
“I just didn’t want to be responsible for this family losing their entire home over an unattended barbecue fire,” he said.
Parsons, who still was unwinding from the grueling race, thought everything was under control when his friend called him over again, this time to the fire truck.
Parsons realized the firefighter had collapsed and was in cardiac arrest. When he found the man had no pulse, he put his paramedic skills into play and asked his friend to make a second 911 call, this time with news that a firefighter had coded.
Parsons “cranked away” on CPR to resuscitate the man while the dispatcher on the 911 line kept asking questions.
“I politely informed dispatch that while they continued asking questions they were hampering my ability to save this guy’s life and I threw the phone to the ground and began searching through the tender for any sort of airway or medical kit,” he said.
Within a couple of minutes an elderly woman arrived on scene with an automated external defibrillator and an airway kit. It was the firefighter’s wife, Parsons soon realized.
He successfully resuscitated the man, had him take some aspirin and made sure the firefighter had stable vitals before handing him off as the medics showed up.
“I looked around at the storm of equipment I had scattered as I was running a code in my civilian clothes with foreign equipment and kind of laughed to myself and wondered, ‘What just happened?’” he recalled.
The Blodgett firefighter underwent surgery that night. He called Parsons three days ago to thank him for his help, and informed him he’d had bypass surgery and now has a pacemaker and defibrillator.
“It was one heck of a weekend,” Parsons said about the ordeal. To top it off, Parsons got food poisoning and “almost went to the hospital myself.”
He got a chuckle out of the Blodgett firefighter’s first question when he came out of surgery: “Does this mean I’m off the department?”
“Once a firefighter, always a firefighter,” Parsons said. “Oh, and yes, the fire got put out and the house didn’t burn down.”
Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com