Transcripts of Interviews

Prairie Public Interview with EMT Volunteers
Jeff Braaten & Kathy Buckhouse, Hankinson, ND

Jeff Braaten & Kathy Buckhouse, Hankinson, ND, talk about their involvement as Emergency Medical Team volunteers and how the combined lack of funding and decline in the available number of volunteers affects emergency services in rural areas.

Prairie Public
Tell me about your responsibilities on the ambulance and the coverage area.

Jeff Braaten
We cover what eight townships I believe right now, but the subject is being changed by the state legislature right now. I think they’re going to expand on our territory. They passed new legislation where they’re supposed to send out the closest ambulance service, no longer the one whose district you’re in. If we’re closer to the scene or incident, we’ll be dispatched versus another squad even though it’s not in our district.

Prairie Public
Will that present more problems for you guys or do you have to just kind of wait and see how that works?

Jeff Braaten
We’ll have to wait and see how it works, but right now we’re gonna end up in strange territories that we’re unfamiliar with so that will be a problem.

Prairie Public
How far out would you go for a call typically right now? What would be your longest drive?

Kathy Buckhouse
Probably 15 miles any direction. Yeah about 15.

Prairie Public
Talk about how you both got involved in the ambulance service, and how long you’ve been EMTs, and kind of training you go through.

Kathy Buckhouse
There’s 14 or 15 of us that are volunteers. I’ve been on for 17 years. I’m an EMT Basic which means I take the EMT Basic course and get tested. Then every two years every volunteer has to have a 24-hour refresher course along with 48 hours of additional training.

We have two EMTI’s at the next level. They are able to start IV’s. They go through extra training than what we do. Jeff has been on the longest right now.

Jeff Braaten
I’ve been on for 23 years doing this. I got started in it by, conned into doing this, by an old school teacher who used to be on the squad and caught me one day and asked me to join. And I’ve been here ever since. I’m an EMT also, same as Kathy, a basic, and I do the same training she does.

Prairie Public
Has it been rewarding over the years?

Jeff Braaten
In a small community you’re working with everybody you know and some of the incidents are really heart wrenching. One was a farm accident where I had a partner for a number of years—he was an older fella, and we went to a farm accident where a young fella got caught in a silo unloader. And it emotionally tore up my partner, and that was tough to lose a guy that's been your mentor you say for years, and he seen that young guy, and he was never the same. I think that was the one that touched me the most.

Prairie Public
Kathy, was there one that was kind of hard for you?

Kathy Buckhouse
We haul some young kids sometimes. We had a young 20-year-old drown at Lake Elsie. That was real hard, real, real hard. He was my son’s good friend, and that was tough. I hauled a very, very good friend having a heart attack one day, and he was in a bad way. That’s real hard when you haul your close friends.

Prairie Public
How do you stay focused in those times? I suppose you just have to go back to your training. Do you have to kind of forget that you know the people?

Kathy Buckhouse
I detach myself. That’s just a person. It’s not my friend anymore. It’s just a person, and I’m just doing the best I can for them.

Jeff Braaten
Yeah, after awhile ‘cause you gotta take yourself away from it emotionally and just put yourself in there. You’re trained to do what you’re supposed to do—do it. Get unattached. After it’s over with, then you set there and ponder about what’s happened.

Prairie Public
About how many runs you go on a year? Kathy said it’s more now ‘cause of the casino?

Kathy Buckhouse
Yeah, we get called out more to the casino. There are a lot of people going in and out of there ever day. It’s almost like another town the size of Hankinson actually to cover. And used to be 50, 60 calls a year. Now it’s 120.

Jeff Braaten
One hundred ten, 120, 130.

Kathy Buckhouse
Yeah, so through the years it’s gone up. Interstate keeps us pretty busy with car accidents out there.

Prairie Public
Jeff, How’d you get the radio tower? You were missing some calls—and some grant money came through. Take me through that.

Jeff Braaten
The problem was happening in Wahpeton, North Dakota. There’s where our 911 center was located, and we were phone patched out instead of radio dispatched, and the phone line was getting cut occasionally through construction errors or whatever. And there’d be a run, and there’d be no way to page us out from Wahpeton. So we decided to put up our own tower, and luckily we had a donator from Lincoln State Bank. The owner of it donated the vast majority of it, and we got our own tower which has helped immensely for receiving signals, clear signals, and we haven’t missed a call ‘cause of it.

Prairie Public
What’s the hardest part about being a small town ambulance?

Kathy Buckhouse
People, manpower. That’s probably the toughest part I think.

Jeff Braaten
Yeah with the dwindling population, it’s hard to get resources for people to do this type of work. It’s volunteer. Everybody’s busy trying to make an income. Life is getting tougher in a small town. Funding has been a problem in the past, but we formed our own ambulance district right now and receive tax money so that’s helped a lot to keep us going financially. Before we had to put on our own fundraising benefits and to raise money just to buy our equipment. Them days are gone, but now we’re running out of people to man the ambulance. And every small community is having the same problems.

Prairie Public
Do you wish you had more than the 14, 15 volunteers that you have?

Jeff Braaten
Yeah, always. Then you wouldn’t have to have guys like me on for 23 years.

Kathy Buckhouse
And we used to run with a three-man crew, and now we run with a two-man crew because of the lack of numbers. You need to have an EMT in the back all the time. About half our members are drivers only, half our EMTs. Even though we have 14 or 15, part of them are drivers, and they can’t be in the back.

Prairie Public
Talk about the changes in population since you were in high school.

Jeff Braaten
Oh, the population has gone down but not significantly. What’s happened is we’ve ended up with an older population. The younger population has moved out of the area for employment. I mean there are just no jobs available in these small towns anymore so they have to move out.

Prairie Public
But you guys haven’t.

Kathy Buckhouse
It gets in your blood.

Funding for Life Support is provided by a grant from USDA Rural Development