BILLINGS — Montana National Guard and Billings Fire Department partnering to speed up emergency response and search-and-rescue missions in Eastern Montana.
With only two aviation duty stations in the state, including one in Billings, the collaboration aims to ensure life-saving help reaches remote parts of Eastern Montana in record time.
The collaboration focuses on getting Billings Fire Department paramedics on board during search-and-rescue missions.
Watch the National Guard and Fire Department talk about this partnership:
"It looks dangerous to the untrained eye, but it's really not," Zach Lundgren, a standardization pilot said Wednesday.
Billings Fire Department Captain Eric Barbeau said the training involves a hoist maneuver to reach victims in areas inaccessible by an ambulance, such as mountains or wilderness areas.
"We will be potentially hoisted down out of a helicopter to a victim where we can then assess the patient and determine their medical needs," Barbeau said. "Get them back up into the helicopter and then almost like a short haul situation where we will land and then turn them over to ground EMS or a private EMS company."
Lundgren pilots the helicopter during the unpredictable, high-pressure situations.
"My job is ultimately to make sure we can safely execute the mission," Lundgren said. "It's very fluid and situationally dependent. And every situation is different."
Lundgren said that his focus is to make sure that personnel on the aircraft and the patient is safe.
"My primary job is just to make sure we're safe and not putting ourselves into a situation we can't recover from, whether it's weather, power limitations with high, hot, heavy environments," Lundgren said.
The National Guard conducted these operations at least five times last year. They take over missions when crews are available and all other avenues have been exhausted.
Eric Poser with the National Guard said the helicopters are filling a gap in the region, and the aircraft will remain stationed in Billings.
"Search and rescue is not easily obtained out here on this side of the state, and where medic coverage for the National Guard is maybe not as quickly acting as it would be," Poser said.
Poser said that a new facility is in the works and should be finished sometime between summer and fall.
"Placing a facility out here and stationing these helicopters out here with some full-time manning, we have a much quicker response time to anywhere on the east side of the state as opposed to originally, we were only based out of Helena," Poser said.
