Firefighters Answer Call When Baby Comes Calling

The maternity ward was a fire station, the surgical table was a car’s back seat and the attending medical staff were city firefighters--but all ended well on Christmas Day when a 6-pound, 11-ounce, “very healthy” baby girl was delivered to a 24-year old mother.

It all started at Fire Station 6 on North Virgil Avenue when an obviously distraught man speaking in broken English knocked on the station door.

Captain Lou Casas, who speaks Spanish, said that the man “was waving and indicating his wife was having a baby in his car about 100 feet away. So we opened the big doors and I told him to drive his car inside.”

Inside the station, “we had tried to lay some cushions and blankets on the floor, but it was too late and the baby was delivered on the car seat,” Casas said. “It sure felt good to hear her cry. She looked real healthy.”

Casas said that the father, in his excitement, also had hailed a Rampart Division police car. “He got the two officers and everybody into the act and we all helped,” Casas said. “He (the father) said it was his third baby”

After the firefighters washed the infant, city fire paramedics rushed the full-term baby to Kaiser Permanente Hospital on Sunset Boulevard, where a nursing supervisor said, “She’s perfectly healthy, and so is the mother.”

The mother was identified as Ana Cruz, 24. Officials did not have her address.

“We hear everything’s great at the hospital,” Casas said. “Frankly I was more worried about the father than I was her. He was coming apart until the baby came.”

Casas said it was the fourth baby he has delivered in his 11 years with department.

“But this was the greatest feeling,” he said. “It made it feel worthwhile working Christmas day.”