By Susanne Nadeau
Grand Forks Herald
Copyright 2007 Grand Forks Herald
FERTILE, Minn. — When Steven Belau saw a need for emergency services in Fertile, Minn., 30 years ago, he found a way to bring them.
After someone had a heart attack during the Polk County Fair in town 30 years ago, Belau, who was in college, decided 30 minutes were too long to wait for emergency care.
“It just seemed like a bad situation,” he said.
So, Belau, a trained paramedic who lived elsewhere, and a couple of college friends decided they would get together during the four days of the fair to provide emergency assistance should the need arise.
From there, the community was able to put together its ambulance service, the first to provide advanced life support in rural Minnesota with neither a hospital nor resident physician, Belau says.
What began with four college boys and some borrowed medical equipment has grown into the four ambulances and 40 EMTs and paramedics that provide emergency care in a 625-square-mile radius within Polk County. It’s called County Emergency Medical Service.
Three decades of emergency medical services will be celebrated with a dinner and program at 1 p.m. Saturday at County EMS headquarters in Fertile. Retired and long-term volunteers and staff will be honored. The city of Fertile also has declared the week beginning Monday “County EMS Week.”
Belau was instrumental in getting these types of services to Fertile, and he’s still very much involved, despite living in Rochester, Minn. He’s the chief executive officer of the nonprofit rural ambulance service there. He’s also a battalion chief at Rochester.
Belau grew up in Rochester, but he visited his grandparents, Solon and Orpha Gullickson, in Fertile every summer.
Once he and his buddies started doing emergency service work during the annual Polk County Fair, it wasn’t long before they were asked to also respond to other emergencies in the area, Belau recalled.
Belau and a friend trained firefighters in the Fertile department as first responders. Then, in an effort to keep the emergency responders going, the town came together and decided that they would provide ambulance services in Fertile, Belau said. They raised funds for an ambulance and equipment.
The project blossomed, Belau recalled. “Our effort was the first rural-based advanced life support ambulance service. . . . We basically became the template for rural service in the rest of the state. We kind of blazed the trail,” he said.
Basically, the advanced life support service “brings the emergency room or the intensive care unit to a person’s house” or to the scene of an accident, Belau said. “Thirty years ago, this was an uncommon concept.”
If there’s severe weather and a patient can’t be moved to the nearest hospital, paramedics can set up a medical support area in a living room or a bedroom. They can give medication or treat injury after a vehicle crash.
“Back then, most people thought we were going to fail,” Belau said.
It didn’t.
Fertile paramedic Lynne Dahl, who’s been with the department for 23 years, said it responds to about 300 calls each year. Training for emergency response is done in-house, she said. And there are “rescue squads” in each outlying small town.
“They can’t transport a patient,” Dahl said, “but they provide first care until our ambulances get there.”
Dahl said it’s “phenomenal to think about what everybody did to make this whole thing happen.
“Having to fight the inertia of the system, the general consensus that this was an absurdity, and the sentiment at the time was, ‘This can’t work,’” he said. “Community members decided people could get the emergency health care they needed.”