January 15, 1972 The NBC Universal television series EMERGENCY! broke new ground in both the entertainment industry and in the fire service. Often referred to as the first reality-based television show, EMERGENCY! introduced the American public, and the world, to the then-revolutionary concept of using specially trained fire fighters in the field to provide advanced life saving services. In the early 1970\u2019s very few people had ever heard the word \u201cparamedic.\u201d At the time the show debuted on January 15th, 1972, only twelve paramedic squads were in service in the entire country \u2013 eight of them in Los Angeles County. By the end of the show\u2019s seven year run, more than half of U.S. citizens were within four to seven minutes of advanced lifesaving care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
EMERGENCY! aired on NBC at 8:00 p.m. on Saturday nights. The TV firefighter\/paramedics Johnny Gage and Roy DeSoto of the fictional \u201cStation 51\u201d, the apparatus Squad 51 and Engine 51, and the doctors and nurses at \u201cRampart Hospital\u201d quickly became America\u2019s babysitters. To this day, an entire generation of firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, doctors, nurses, police officers and dispatchers proudly say that EMERGENCY! was their inspiration for answering the call to public service and emergency patient care that has saved countless lives in the last five decades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
January 15, 1972 The NBC Universal television series EMERGENCY! broke new ground in both the entertainment industry and in the fire service. Often referred to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1834,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-county-wide","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.suburbanfiremarshal.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.suburbanfiremarshal.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.suburbanfiremarshal.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.suburbanfiremarshal.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.suburbanfiremarshal.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1832"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/new.suburbanfiremarshal.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1835,"href":"https:\/\/new.suburbanfiremarshal.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832\/revisions\/1835"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.suburbanfiremarshal.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.suburbanfiremarshal.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.suburbanfiremarshal.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.suburbanfiremarshal.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}