Pennsylvania

For Montgomery County Second Alarmer's, Saving Lives is All in a Day's Work

NBC10 joined an EMS crew with Montgomery County's Second Alarmer's for an inside look at a day in the life on an ambulance in Montco.

Sergey Tsipenyuk peered at the graying, frail man lying on a stretcher in front of him, bleeding from his face.

"What month are we in?" Tsipenyuk asked, his hands deftly working to prepare an IV in the man's arm as Tsipenyuk's partner, Chris Santillo, hooked him up to a heart monitor.

The man, in his 80s, hurt and confused after apparently losing consciousness and crashing his car in Abington Township, stared for a long moment, then answered. "September," he said slowly.

"Who's the president?" Tsipenyuk pressed.

"Obama," the man responded, quicker this time.

They're questions that Tsipenyuk, a paramedic and pre-hospital nurse, and Santillo, an EMT, ask over and over again throughout their 12-hour shifts working for the Second Alarmer's of Montgomery County. They're two questions among a myriad of inquiries the men calmly pose to patients as they stabilize them in the sterile bed of an orange and white ambulance, where they work to save patients' lives as they determine their level of alertness, figure out what happened to them, and decide how to fix whatever's wrong.

USE resize second alarmers car crash abington
Morgan Zalot | NBC10
Police and EMS arrive at the scene where two cars crashed, leaving a man hurt, in Abington Township.

USE resize Sergey T and Chris S main photo Montco second alarmers
Morgan Zalot | NBC10
Sergey Tsipenyuk and Chris Santillo have been partners at Second Alarmer's for about a year now. Teams at the EMS company are made up of a paramedic and an EMT.
USE resize serg townsend santillo second alarmers
Morgan Zalot | NBC10
Paramedic Sergey Tsipenyuk, left, Battalion Chief John Townsend, center, and EMT Chris Santillo take a short break between calls in the ambulance bay outside Abington Memorial Hospital.
USE second alarmers LUCAS cpr machine
Morgan Zalot | NBC10
Second Alarmer's of Montgomery County Battalion Chief John Townsend shows how the LUCAS automatic CPR machine works.
USE second alarmers davidson townsend roll out stretcher
Morgan Zalot | NBC10
Assistant Chief of Operations Kenneth Davidson, left, and Battalion Chief John Townsend unroll a Foxtrot roll-up stretcher that go along with Second Alarmer's trauma "go bags."

Contact Us