Annie Krawze’s favorite room in the new Laona Rescue Unit facility is the medical supply room.
“I was like, we are getting a supply room, and it is going to be an organized supply room,” said Krawze, Laona Rescue Unit President and Service Director.
The Rescue Unit has the same kind and same amount of medical supplies as it previously had, but before those supplies had to be split between two locations, one in Wabeno and one in Laona.
Meaning if they ran out in one place, someone would have to run supplies from the other.
“This is huge for us, to be able to come out of one building, keep supplies together. It’s financially even. Yes, it's a bigger facility, but we're not actually paying rent at two different buildings, electric bill at two different buildings, it gets to all be combined into one,” she said.
Krawze says those aren’t the only improvements since the new Laona Rescue Unit facility finished construction earlier this year.
Custom built
The Laona Rescue Unit responds to emergency medical calls in a roughly 405 square mile area of Forest County.
The new department off Highway 32, south of Laona, has more comfortable living quarters, better security, a triage room, and helipad.
All of this plus the new central location has improved response times to calls.
“We are the most centrally located to every population that we service, and where the majority of the calls are. We're right in the middle,” said Krawze. “There's a few places that would see like a minute to two longer, but for the most part, most call times, response times dropped.”
One of the more unique features of the new facility is the triage room off the front door.
Krawze says they frequently get people just showing up at their front door rather than call an ambulance or drive 45 minutes to the nearest hospital.
“You can get anything from the person that's in cardiac arrest to the heart attack, to the person that cut their leg with the chainsaw and is bleeding all over, to the overdose,” said Krawze. “All of them just appear here. We wanted a quick, easy access somewhere we could do stabilization and to get to an ambulance. Also something that was easily accessible.”
Communication is still a challenge, though that issue is county wide.
Communication challenges
Most emergency dispatches run on a simulcast system.
This means when a 911 call comes in, the dispatcher can hit one button to send out the call to all the towers in a county.
Forest County isn’t set up like that, instead a dispatcher has to ping a specific tower for where response is needed.
It also means first responders have to switch channels based on their location and which tower they can pick up.
Forest County Emergency Management Director Stephanie Montgomery says it’s not an ideal system, but it would cost millions of dollars to replace it.
“It creates some challenges and just communication barriers for different departments, just communicating with each other, not just dispatch as well,” said Montgomery.
The lack of reception in the county also means that first responders might not always get the call over their radios, even if the radio is on the right channel for the nearest tower.
“We are in a dead zone for internet, for cell phone as well as the radios. So that is a huge hurdle here for us,” said Krawze.
As back up to ensure they’re getting the calls, Laona Rescue Unit installed the “I Am Responding” system in the new facility.
It’s an internet-based service. A text message appears on a monitor at the Laona Rescue Unit. It shows up once dispatchers in Crandon upload the call into their system. It’s tied into speakers at the station to alert first responders when a call comes in.
Krawze says it relies on Starlink satellite internet services since they can’t get any other provider at their location.
“We have a nice new building, but we have to be able to receive the 911 call. So that's been a huge challenge for us,” said Krawze. “We put in the backup I Am Responding system, which helps us as the fail safe, but not as fast as the just hitting a button for a tower.”
Krawze says this facility checks just about every box on their wish list to make this new building as efficient as possible.
It’s something she wasn’t sure would be possible when they first started down this path more than five years ago.
Finding the funding
Up until 2016, Laona Rescue Unit just covered Laona and some neighboring townships.
Then the Town of Wabeno reached out asking them to cover their town and surrounding townships because they’re ambulance provider was no longer an option.
To cover that area, the rescue unit was split.
Volunteers stayed in Laona. Paid staff was housed at a department in Wabeno during their shift.
After being there less than two years, an inspector found the Wabeno Department wasn’t up to code. To fix the issues would have cost half a million dollars.
“It was going to be half a million dollars just to do the minimal amount of repairs to the building that we needed to do. We did not have half a million dollars,” said Krawze. “It was kind of looked at as spending money dumb, to try to come up with half a million dollars to put into this old building and we were still coming out of Laona in an old building as well.”
The Forest County Potawatomi Tribe paid for a feasibility study.
That study found the best solution would be to build a new facility along Highway 32 between the two communities.
But paying for it was an uphill battle.
Forest County is mostly National Forest Land. This means it has a very small tax base to work with.
Building a new facility from county or town funds wasn’t an option, so Krawze started applying for grants.
She says there was a learning curve to the grant writing process, but by doing research she found it was possible to write successful grants.
“Don't be discouraged just because you're smaller or you're rural, that doesn't mean that you're not going to hit the jackpot, because I definitely consider us hitting the jackpot,” said Krawze.
Laona Rescue Unit ended up getting two major state and federal funding sources totaling more than $4 million to build the new facility.
USDA Acting Deputy Under Secretary for Rural Development Lilian Salerno visited Laona Rescue Unit last week to see firsthand what the federal funding was able to accomplish.
“I was sort of blown away when I came and I saw the facility itself. It punches above its weight, in the sense of its, you know, modernness and effectiveness. People really sat down and thought about what they needed,” said Salerno.
Krawze was proud to show off what they’ve created.
The grants made the new facility possible. With that accomplished, Krawze is focused on sustainability.
Sustaining the station
“We can build shiny and new. We can have fancy things, but if we can't sustain them, it's not doing anyone any good,” said Krawze.
Krawze says with the limited tax base, there’s not a lot to pull from. On top of that, a lot of the population they serve is on Medicaid or Medicare which means the station doesn’t get much in terms of reimbursement for calls.
That was one of Salerno’s big takeaways from her visit.
“It's just we've got to be better, the federal government, to make sure we give the kind of resources that people can access our services,” said Salerno.
The Laona Rescue Unit has 15 paid staff members and five volunteers.
On average, they respond to 500 calls per year.
This story is part of WXPR’s focus on solutions in the Northwoods. You can learn more about our Solutions Journalism effort and share ideas here.
