[Music] I'm council member Tony Kata here with Deputy fire chief Nick aragoni to learn more about our colge growth fire department Nick so tell me how has the fire department changed over the years yeah so it's changed drastically over the last 10 or 15 years um we used to be primarily a paid on call fire department and due to call increase um we've had to change that model we went more to a full-time uh fire department and uh EMS Department we're staffed here 247365 and then we have a complement of part-time firefighter EMTs and paramedics that make up the rest of the duty crew to respond to any fire or EMS call that we get throughout the day this year uh we'll do almost 5,000 calls uh for service and I know that our response times are some of the best in the Metro with our current model is that correct that is correct we average about a 6-minute response time um get take and that's in the city of Cottage Grove to St Paul Park and Newport for our EMS response and then um into Cottage Grove for our fire response Cottage Grove was recently designated a heart Safe Community what does that mean for Cottage Grove and how did we accomplish that it's a huge accomplishment it means a lot to us not only as the fire department but as a city as a whole uh the heart safe designation is reached by certain benchmarks that you hit and in the year of 20123 we trained over uh 2500 people in hands only CPR and Adu and we were able to identify over 75 aeds that are located throughout this city um we're going to continue that in 2024 and we've uh got off to a good start and we plan to continue that uh that designation for our city oh wow what's our goal for total number of uh aeds which for anyone who doesn't know an AED is an automatic emergency defibrillator yeah in the past we didn't have a good um feel for where all of our ads were located so as we do life safety and fire inspections in our commercial buildings our goal is to either locate where that AED is so we would like a 100% uh location rate for all of our commercial establishments and then we also work with them if they do not have an AED that's in their facility we work with them to get um funding to secure an ad for their location and through our life safety uh inspection program after every inspection that we do we offer free handson CPR and AED and then also stop the bleed training to every business in the city can you update on the partnership with the Teddy's Heart Foundation yeah so we work very close with uh Teddy's heart foundation and it's been a true honor to work with them um over the past and continue in a good relationship as we move forward um like you stated we we help them Place ads into Parks but also another Big Goal we have is to train people in hands only CPR in a use very important to us to that we train as many people as we can that if somebody suffers a sudden Cardiac Arrest the lay person or the bystander knows what to do right away away yeah and in those instances seconds matter so absolutely it's important work yep so Teddy's heart has partnered with local organizations and groups to continue to provide ads in all of our local parks here in Cottage Grove they've been successful in placing multiple already and with the goal of placing ads in every public park here in Cottage Grove Cottage Grove Fire and EMS are committed to community engagement what are some of the programs that you guys are involved with we have multiple and we take a lot of pride in our community engagement so the first one would be the safe haven program uh we started that this year and it's really going out to the citizens home and making sure that we teach them about fire prevention and just safe living practices we also like I stated do a lot of CPR uh hands only CPR training to the public and a use and with that we also teach first aid and stop the bleed and then in August we always go out and participate in the nights unite and more than just bringing a truck or a piece of our apparatus we always pick a subject to teach the public about um in our realm of work and then this summer we're partnering with South Washington County School District and we'll be reading to the kids as part of their summer program and then multiple times throughout the year we offer certification CPR classes and those are taught at the hero Center and if anybody's interested they can go to the hero Center website and register and we offer those four times throughout the year well thank you Nick I appreciate your time today I'm Tony kado with your June Council update thank you for joining us [Music]