On March 8th, the Soldotna Police Department received a large sum of money from U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski’s Consolidated Appropriations Act for 2024.
In Congressional funds, the SPD received a total of $110,000, which will be used to supply the department with Emergency Care Equipment.
According to Soldotna Police Chief Gene Meek, the SPD applied through the Senator’s office for congressional funds. The department was extremely excited when their application was accepted.
“And what the funds are to be used for is #1, the supplies needed for Officer [Reed] Culver to go out into the community and train casualty care. It doesn’t have to be like an active shooter, it be any mass incident where you’re going to have large amounts of casualties. So he’ll have these training aids on how to pack wounds, how to apply tourniquets, how to put chest compresses on people so that they’re able to stop bleeding and expand someone’s life expectancy so that we can get them to ambulances, we can get them to hospitals for further treatment and then it also has an allocation amount for supplies so we can stockpile. The tourniquets and the chest compresses and the medical kits into each patrol vehicle and at specific locations around town and into the Peninsula so that if we have a mass casualty incident we can go and get you supplies and start treating people,” said Meek.
According to the project description, the Soldotna Police Department desired a large quantity of the previously mentioned items and proper training equipment to save as many lives as possible in one of these critical situations.
They also hope that they can train community members to use these items to help themselves in personal emergencies and help emergency responders in mass casualty incidents.
Currently, each officer carries a tourniquet on their person and one chest compress to stop bleeding. However, in the case of multiple people being hurt, this is inadequate to treat more than one person.
Typically, these life-saving items are purchased through the yearly department budget.
The primary goal of this project would be the accumulation of necessary items to treat multiple casualties on any critical scene. Training equipment would be used to supply updated training for Soldotna Officers and initial training for any new officers with the department.
However, these emergency care items and training equipment could additionally be used for community engagements and community education. These training and education sessions would include but are not limited to:
- Open public training sessions at the Police Department, Soldotna Library, etc.
- Training of school staff, teachers, and administrators
- Training at athletic events or Soldotna Creek Park Public events
- Public engagement presentations to the various emergency health, wellness, and philanthropic organizations in our area
“The rules of saving lives is almost unlimited. And we’re using this grant to help supply ourselves. And Officer Culver already has the training now, and he has definitely the experience because of his military service in the Army, that we’re just trying to set up the community for success instead of failure,” said Meek.
The SPD is comprised of 9 sworn police officers, 3 sergeants, and 1 lieutenant all under the direction and leadership of the Chief of Police. While the SPD is not large with a population of 4500, they think of themselves as being huge in heart, service a population of approximately 35,000 people on the Kenai Peninsula, and pride ourselves in being innovative in our efforts to provide the highest level of service to the community.
