First Responders Facts

Officers Dennis Stachura and Marco Lomibao took a 1:35 AM call in Glendale Heights, Illinois. A car had sunk 12 feet into a frozen pond at 1 degree Fahrenheit. They arrived to find three people - hands visible above the ice. They jumped in, broke through with shovels and a sledgehammer, and held all three afloat until backup arrived. Everyone survived.

Bretagne, a golden retriever, worked Ground Zero for 10 days after 9/11 as a 2-year-old. She later responded to Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Ivan. When she died at 16 in 2016, firefighters lined the sidewalk and saluted her - then carried her out draped in an American flag.

Officer Mohammed Suleiman watched a car sink nose-first into a Virginia pond with a woman trapped inside. He smashed her window and cut her seatbelt while other officers and bystanders linked hands, wading into the water to form a human chain. Together, they pulled her to shore. She survived with only minor injuries.

About two out of every three firefighters in America are volunteers. More than 18,000 U.S. fire departments have no paid staff at all. In those towns, a plumber, a teacher or a farmer answers the call. They leave the job the moment the pager goes off. That's still true in most of small-town America.

The Jaws of Life, the hydraulic tool that pries a wrecked car open, came out of a drag racing parts shop. George Hurst, who made the shifters in America's muscle cars, watched a crash crew take over an hour to free a driver in the 1960s and built a rescue tool of his own. His first weighed 350 pounds; the version that followed weighed 65. Fire crews still cut people out of cars with it every day.