Antrim Fire & Ambulance Chief Marshall Gale, who grew up in Antrim, remembers when the town had no ambulance of its own.
“We used to have to call Hillsborough for transport, or people drove themselves. Back in the day, the undertaker used to put people in the back of the Cadillac and throw the red light on top and drive them to Concord,” Gale said.
Antrim and Bennington residents formed Antrim Bennington Rescue Squad in 1975, and Gale joined the ranks the next year. The squad officially went into service March 5, 1976, and in 1979, it moved to the new fire station on Clinton Road.
Gale started training as an EMT after Mike Beauchamp, who was chief at the time, asked him to take EMS training. At the time, Gale was assistant chief, and Beauchamp was grooming him to take over as chief.
“He threw me into the pool, so to speak. He asked me to take EMS classes, because we were a fire-based EMS service. It turned out that I really liked it. I liked being able to help people when they were having the worst day of their life. I liked making a difference and making them feel better,” Gale said. “I wanted to do more.”
Gale kept building on his training over the years, first as an EMT-Intermediate, which certified him to do IVs and administer some medication to patients.
“After the National Register of EMTS changed the levels of care, then it became advanced EMT, and we were trained in more skills and interventions. They wanted us to be more of a clinician and less of a technician,” Gale said. “They wanted us to be ‘thinking EMTs.’”
Gale has seen numerous changes in his 49 years with Antrim Fire & Ambulance.
“The EMS is the busy side now. Each year, our call volume increases, and we see such a wide variety of calls— from the person who sprains their ankle to the person in cardiac arrest to the person who has experienced severe trauma in a motor vehicle accident,” Gale said.
That first year, the service had 85 calls. In 2024, it had 500 calls.
Gale says responding to motor vehicle accidents on Route 9 has always been a challenge for the department.
“Route 9 has certainly been problematic, and it seems to run in spurts. We had a spell a few months ago where we had three crashes right a row. One involved a school bus; one was a head-on collision,” he said.
Gale feels the intensity and frequency of motor vehicle accidents has increased over the years.
“It has gotten worse. It is a major east-west corridor for the state. There is increased vehicle traffic. There is increased speed, and there is distracted driving,” Gale said.
Both the ambulance and fire departments do constant training and recertification to keep up with advances in medical techniques, medications, new equipment and fire safety.
Gale recently did an eight-hour training on the dangers of lithium battery fires.
“One new thing the Fire Department has to stay on top of is lithium battery fires. We have been lucky; we have not had an EV fire yet. It takes very different tactics to fight those fires; it’s not going to be a traditional approach where you go in and try to put on as much water as you can, because with those fires, it actually takes tens of thousands of gallons to extinguish those fires,” Gale said. “They have some blankets which you put over the car; it doesn’t put the fire out, but it helps contain the fire. The biggest thing is to keep the cells that have not erupted in fire yet cool. The individual cells do not burn terribly long, but obviously then burn with great intensity; there are 17,000 separate little cells in those batteries.”
Antrim Fire & Ambulance is the only call-based ambulance service remaining in the Monadnock Region, with the staff taking call form their homes or places of work.
“We will not be able to sustain that model forever, because it’s getting harder and harder to find people to make the commitment. Once you have finished (EMT) school and passed all your exams, the continuing education never stops, and the learning never stops. Every two years you have to get recertified. It’s a big commitment,” Gale said.
Gale said the department may evolve to have full-time staff at some point in the future.
“We will probably have to start with some per diem people Monday through Friday during the day, and work up to a 24-hour job,” Gale said. “We’ll see what happens.”
Even with training, Gale said, “Nothing can prepare you for the first time you see a trauma.”
“We have a pretty good support system among everybody. We always look out for the newer people, or if we know any members have been on a real horrific scene or seen something really hard. You try to prepare new people as best you can, but sometimes you are just not going to know until you are at that scene how you are going to respond. Everybody deals with it in their own way,” Gale said. “If I thought about all the things I have seen in 49 years — for anyone who has been doing this for a long time, you just have to find a way to deal with it and keep going. I guess I found my way.”
Gale says despite the hardest aspects of being an EMT and firefighter, the job is endlessly rewarding.
“I had someone say to me just the other day, ‘I just had to come thank you for saving my life.’ And I said, ‘It was a team effort, it really took all of us.’ The doctor in Concord had told us that if it had been another 15 minutes, this person would not have survived,” Gale said. “With today’s ambulances and the training and equipment we have, I won’t say we’re a hospital on wheels, but we certainly can do a lot. We save a lot of people.”
Gale said he is most proud of his department’s ability to mobilize.
“I was looking at the data, and for the vast majority of our calls, we are on the road in seven minutes, and that just speaks volumes of the dedicated folks we have in our department,” Gale said. “That is something we can really be proud of.”