Sheriff’s office buys AED for fire department

Thanks to the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office, the Fairfield Fire Department has received another automated external defibrillator.

Fairfield Fire Chief Scott Vaughan said the new AED brings the total number of such devices in the department to three. An AED is a device for reviving a heart that has stopped beating by delivering an electric shock.

Last year, the fire department launched an emergency medical response service, where it assisted ambulance crews and other first responders on the scene. Vaughan said the department's AEDs were placed in its trucks that would respond to such medical calls: Rescue 17, its medical truck, and Engine 12, the city pumper. The pumper truck it used to fight fires in the county did not have an AED. Now it does.

'A [patient] or firefighter might have an accident, and we wouldn't have had access to an AED,” Vaughan said.

The fire department didn't have the funds necessary to purchase a third AED. That's where Jefferson County Sheriff Gregg Morton got involved. Morton heard about the fire department's financial predicament, and saw that he was going to have some money left over in his sheriff's office budget. He thought that the best use of the money was to purchase an AED the fire department could not otherwise afford.

The AED cost between $2,500-$3,000 and comes with two sets of pads for adults and one set for a child.