By the time Sgt. 1st Class Mikana Halloran descended from a helicopter by way of a winch-fed cable toward the top of Crow Pass, her target, a single hypothermic hiker, was stripped down near naked. "He left all his stuff on the ground. He was just wearing his underwear," Halloran said of the August rescue. Stuck in the wet and cold of the Chugach Mountains, the man gradually shed all his soaked outerwear trying to keep it from further freezing him, until, by the time help arrived, he was left in just base layers. Halloran strapped him into a harness, and the pair ascended into the belly of a Black Hawk outfitted for medical care. There, she jammed heat packs under the otherwise-uninjured man's armpits before swaddling him in blankets for the flight to an Anchorage hospital.  

VIDEO: A fire quickly consumed a string of row homes in West Philadelphia on Tuesday, putting over a dozen people out of their homes. Velice Hids, who lives on the 200 block of North Hobart Street, says she smelled smoke and heard a loud smack before running to the window to see where the startling noise could have come from. As soon as she looked out her window, she says she saw flames shooting from the row home across the street. "It was jumping from house to house. I never saw anything like that in my life before," said Hids. Reacting immediately, Hids ran across the street and began banging on the door of her 91-year-old neighbor, Theresa Pope, who lives alone and right next door to where the fire started. "It was scary. It was scary. I broke out a window. I just wanted to make sure she wasn't in the house, that's all," said Hids.  

Catholic Health has started using an app that helps EMTs better communicate with emergency rooms, and says it may be a potential saver, especially when seconds count. It's called Pulsara and installed on an EMTs smartphone or tablet, allowing them to engage in real-time consultation with emergency room doctors and nurses to triage and assess patients while they are en route to the hospital. "Traditionally EMTs have phoned into a number directly to the emergency room, but sometimes if the doctor is not there, or tending to another patient, the nurse has to go find them," explained Lori Dufrense, who oversees all of the emergency rooms in the Catholic Health system locally. "This way not only are the doctor and the emergency room staff notified, but so are the cardiac team if it's a heart attack, or the neuro team if it's a stroke patient."  

VIDEO: The Louisville Water Company held a demonstration Tuesday in honor of Fire Prevention Week, showing how crucial its hydrants are around the city. Louisville Water owns and maintains around 25,000 fire hydrants throughout the city. It has an entire team that tests, services and maintains the hydrants year-round. Crews offered a first-hand look Tuesday at how that's done. "We're a two-man crew — plumber leader and plumber leader assistant — and we're one of two trucks that maintain and repair all the hydrants in the city, be them damaged or leaking or inoperable," said Chris Meeks with Louisville Water. Thanks to new technology, firefighters are now able to find hydrants before arriving on scene. Louisville Fire has access to a map — through phones and iPads — that gives responders directions and shows exactly where the hydrants are in that area so they can be hooked into faster.  

PHOTO: The fire department is having an open house on Saturday, and the department plans to have a very special visitor. After it was rebuilt in Washington state, a 1934 Seagrave fire truck will arrive in Beverly on Wednesday and be prepared before it comes home to Ipswich, completing an almost 90-year journey that saw it owned by people in Massachusetts, Vermont, New York, and Washington. The truck was recently purchased by Ora CEO Stuart Abelson, who wants the rig to go on display in Ipswich rather than get stored in a garage somewhere. The owner before Abelson was James Sullivan, a middle-school STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) teacher in Brier, Wash.  

October 12th marks the start of what is still known as the worst natural disaster to ever hit Minnesota. The Minnesota Historical Society says more than 450 people died in the Cloquet, Duluth and Moose Lake fires. More than 1,500 square miles were scorched and towns and villages burned flat. The whole event lasted less than 15 hours from beginning to end. The fire began around midday on Saturday, October 12th, 1918. By 3:00 a.m. Sunday all was over except for some smoldering. The event is primarily called the Cloquet fire, but it was really 50 or more fires that all combined into one event. In the Kettle River area, people saved themselves in streams, ditches and open fields. Many died either by the fire or in root cellars by suffocation. As the fire reached Moose Lake, relief trains rescued a few hundred people.