Facility a boost for Lake Louise emergency responders

MAT-SU — For years the small cadre of first responders at Lake Louise made do without any buildings.

The department — which boasts a roster seven names long — had an ambulance, but parked it outside with its engine block heater plugged in when the weather was cold. When an emergency call went out, a responder would call the Lake Louise Lodge and someone there would clean the snow off the ambulance and start it up.

“If they had trouble starting it we weren’t made aware of it,” said Lake Louise Ambulance Chief Corky Matthews.

But it was still far from ideal. Anything that could freeze — like medicine and IV bags — responders had to keep at home.

That all changed this year.

At the end of August the department moved into a new garage, what the Mat-Su Borough is calling a “warm storage facility.” It’s not quite a fire station, but it’s pretty close.

“This will work as a full-on fire station. We have 2,000 gallons of water stored in it in a gravity-fed tank,” Matthews said.

There’s also an office to store records — which, until now, were also kept at responders’ homes — and ample garage space for training.

“We’ve had to train in the lodges and the lodges have been most gracious and helpful to us, but there still is the public coming and going,” Matthews said. “It’s distracting and some people like to be a little more private, I think, with their learning.”

Matthews said what’s stored in the garage so far is the ambulance, an ATV and a “fire department in a box,” which consists of two ATV trailers, one carrying high-pressure equipment to spray foamed-up water and the other a water tank and pump.

“Forestry has told us they will be getting us a brush truck to store there,” Matthews said.

He and his responders aren’t set up to do any kind of structural firefighting. If a building catches fire, Lake Louise responders will show up to make sure it doesn’t spread. Nobody’s going inside to fight the blaze.

“We do have fire bombs that we can throw into a building that kind of evacuate the air with a chemical,” Matthews said.

Mostly what he and his responders do is emergency medical work. And, at Lake Louise, it’s a particular kind of emergency medical work.

“Most of our responses are either by water or by snowmachine to the accident, then we have to bring them back to the ambulance,” Matthews said.

A lot of those patients will then be airlifted out. He said that often means driving them to Eureka so the air ambulance doesn’t have to refuel. Usually, Matthews said, he pulls into the parking lot just in time to see the helicopter’s lights flying in.

“It really saves the patient almost an hour if we take the patient to Eureka,” Matthews said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.