Depending on your Scouting group, another option may be to take a wilderness first aid course put on by some other organization and get your group to reimburse your costs. Assuming things work the same where you are, they are paying for the course out of their own bank account either way.

My group paid for my first aid recert when it came due.

I 1000% agree with the "get trained in first aid" - I wish "EMT-B" was part of the standard curriculum in high schools.

Nice sentiment. Won't work in most places.

For example, our Firehouse. The phone number is 610-982-5710. Go ahead, call it. I'll wait. Unless you happend to call when there was someone there - which isn't very often - you'll get voicemail. It's a volunteer company - as are all of the surrounding companies. Unstaffed, response is via pagers & siren triggered by - you guessed it - the 911 center. While a 911 outage would not prevent them from tripping the pagers/siren, the steps that lead up to that dispatch would be missing. In fact, even big, paid fire companies leave the firehouse empty when on a call.

EMS, a paid service, is dispatched in the same way, and while they are staffed, if they are enroute back to station from a hospital trip, they are dispatched by radio...from the 911 center. Again, empty building, nobody there to answer the phone if they are on a call.

Police are a little different - they do have staff on duty 24/7 but they are not really equipped to self-dispatch.

My point: Don't think that having the phone number will matter.

I once did CPR on a dead guy for 40 minutes.

I wish we had stopped, but policy was to keep CPR going once started until a doctor or coroner says stop. His wife, an RN, had started CPR about 30 minutes before we arrived at the wilderness location. He had no pulse, no respiration and was getting colder the whole time. Me and a firehouse buddy continued CPR as we hauled him out of a rough terrain area in the woods.

Get the local number for the dispatch center if your local firehouse is commonly unmanned. Or call the police station -- they should be able to reach a dispatcher for the fire department on your behalf.

All 9-1-1 centers have "7-digit emergency numbers" that alarm companies, OnStar, etc. call to report emergencies and incidents. These are the numbers that you want for a 9-1-1 outage. Depending upon where you live, you might have one, two, or three 9-1-1 centers that dispatch your area. For example, where I live, the local 9-1-1 center dispatches police only, a "regional" center dispatches fire and EMS. Generally these numbers are published in the local phone directory (remember those?), and sometimes on agency web sites. If in doubt, call the local agency on their business line and ask.

It makes a difference in Washington, D.C., where the Metro police have neighborhood substations (I memorized the nearest one's phone number years ago) and other jurisdictions (such as the Capitol Police) can also respond and also have non-911 phone numbers.

Having the phone numbers certainly won't hurt.



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As I said, Police have staffing. That's 33% of the solution, which is better than 0% I guess.

The figures I've seen are 40% with the combination of CPR and defilbrator if the defilbrator is applied within 5 minutes. (Swedish national "CPR register", several thousand cases). If you don't do CPR but still apply the defilbrator within five minutes the survival rate is 20%. The risk of permanent nevrological damage also increases massively. If the defilbrator is applied in the 6-10 minutes window the survival rate is 30% with CPR and 10% without.

Add to this that the quality of CPR is likely to vary considerably among these cases, but it's close to impossible to correct for that. There is no way of knowing how many of the fatalities that could have lived if they had received higher quality CPR.

Yes, more than half of the people with a stopped heart will die. But immediate CPR does save lives - if you can apply defilbrator within minuttes. And advanced hospital treatment within hours is absolutely essential for the quality of life for those you're able to resurrect.

I have no information about how the survival rate is distributed across fitness and age, but I wouldn't be surprised if the chances are much better for a healty, not too old person that receives immediate CPR followed up by quick defilbrator and a trip to the hospital. Heart failure isn't something that exclusively happen to people in very poor health. Even athletes die from hearth related problems.

The number of fatalities from people not receiving CPR when they needed it is 100%. I suspect the number of potential rescuers that experience the guilt of not trying because they thought the odds were against them is about the same 100%. The odds being against us not a good reason to not learn or try CPR in my books.