Why do you send a fire engine when I called an ambulance?

All Hull Fire Department members are trained as Paramedics or Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT). During a medical emergency minutes, in fact seconds count! The response of the closest fire engine to your emergency brings trained firefighter/EMT's to your home or office within minutes. Emergency life saving equipment such as oxygen, semi-automatic defibrillator, and other medical equipment are carried on the fire engine for use by these trained firefighters.

Additional staff on a fire engine also provides supervision and it is necessary to have additional trained personnel to assist in moving stretchers through buildings, carrying patients down stairways or when slippery conditions are encountered. This helps to reduce back injuries to personnel handling unwieldy stretchers and heavy patients. It is also necessary to have more than two people perform certain treatments such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation while moving a patient.

Four minutes is a critical time frame for someone who has experienced a heart attack, injury or other illness that make him or her stop breathing. The heart and brain have a better chance of full recovery if they receive oxygen in four minutes or less. After that, a person can suffer brain damage or worse. Firefighters and paramedics can use lifesaving techniques and medications to help prevent death or permanent injury much more effectively if they can get to a patient within the first four minutes.

At traffic accidents the fire engine personnel keep the area safe if there are fuel spills, fire and extricating the person from the wreckage.