TX Medics, FFs Who Saved Ex-Homeland Security Head Honored

Austin-Travis County EMS medics and Austin firefighters were recognized Thursday morning for rescuing former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge when he suffered a heart attack in Austin in 2017.

Thursday's visit to the National Association of EMS Physicians' annual meeting in downtown Austin marked the first time Ridge has returned to Austin since his heart attack. He delivered a keynote speech at the meeting before recognizing the firefighters and medics who helped him.

Ridge said he was grateful to back in the center of what he called "the Austin incident."

"I'm exhibit A for what you do. I'm exhibit A for your training, I'm exhibit A for your protocol, I'm exhibit A for your professionalism," Ridge told the crowd of EMS professionals gathered in a ballroom at the JW Marriott hotel.

"In emergency situations, you're dealing with strangers but you treat them like loved ones," Ridge told the crowd.

Ridge, Pennsylvania's governor before being picked by then-President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks to be the nation's first homeland security secretary, had come to Austin in November 2017 for a meeting of the Republican Governors Association.

One morning he woke up in his hotel room feeling a bit sick, he told Dan Balz of the Washington Post last February. After searching the internet for heart attack information, Ridge thought maybe his symptoms weren't serious. But they persisted. He grabbed his phone and searched again, this time finding a checklist of heart attack symptoms.

"I said, 'Check. Check. Check. Ridge, you could be having a heart attack,' " he told the Post.

Ridge made it to the hotel phone and gave the operator his room number.

Emergency crews responded to his room and worked on him for over an hour, during which he flatlined three times: once in his room, then in an elevator and in the lobby of the hotel. While trying to revive Ridge, medics broke several of his ribs and cracked his sternum. He was taken to a hospital where he was kept on life support for six days. He recovered in Austin for more than a month before getting back to Washington.

"These first responders kept me alive," he told the Post.

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