Jeff Crank’s day started before dawn.

Nearly six months into his first term in Congress, the Colorado Springs Republican drove up Interstate 25 in the dark on the morning of June 17 to the Aurora studios of talk radio station KNUS 710, where Crank joined local talkers Jeff Hunt and Bill Thorpe for an hour-long appearance on their titular show to discuss the GOP’s big budget bill, the future of Space Force and President Donald Trump’s recent Gold Dome proposal.

A couple hours later, back in El Paso County, the 58-year-old longtime political pro turned his focus toward matters closer to home for the remainder of his tightly scheduled day, with a reporter in tow.

By the time Crank’s day in the district had wrapped up, he’d taken a few rides in a fire engine, observed paramedics attend to a swimmer who had a medical emergency at the downtown YMCA, watched himself on a video feed from the fire department’s tricked-out drone, climbed into the cockpit of an early 1990s-era Air Force transport plane, and learned how to fold an overstuffed breakfast burrito.

And he also sold a lottery ticket.

Crank didn’t, however, get to go up in the bucket on Tower 1, the fire department’s new, $1.6 million truck. Heavy gray skies that spilled rain through the day prohibited what one firefighter joked might risk returning a “barbecued congressman” from Crank’s first ride-along with the Colorado Springs Fire Department.

In addition to a close-up view of firefighting crews, their equipment and some innovative practices, Crank attended a briefing from command staff of the 302nd Airlift Wing at Petersen Space Force Base and then spent a couple hours learning the ins and outs of a busy Maverik Convenience Store on the southwest side of town for a tour set up by the National Association of Convenience Stores, including donning the store’s uniform and getting behind the counter.

It wasn’t exactly a typical workday — Crank mostly divides his time between the 5th Congressional District and the Capitol Complex in Washington, D.C. with regular airplane trips stitching the two together — but his staffers said those are hard to pinpoint, with a steady stream of meetings with constituents and local groups, committee hearings and floor votes.

‘It’s tougher than my job’

Working as a convenience store clerk was a first for Crank, though he’d already completed four ride-alongs with local first-responders since taking office by the time he joined the firefighters for the morning, including two outings with the Colorado Springs Police Department and two with El Paso County sheriffs. Crank said he plans to continue both methods of gaining understanding about the lives his constituents lead and the challenges they face.

“I’ve never actually gone out and worked with someone. It’s pretty cool,” Crank said with a broad smile after changing out of his Maverik shirt at the end of his abbreviated shifts preparing food and working the cash register. “I told them, it’s tougher than my job. I mean, really, there’s a lot to learn, and maybe you learn it quickly, but for me, it was pretty tough.”

Crank said the experience left him with clear takeaways that will help him better represent his constituents.

“You know, things like this, you realize how hard people work for their money, right?” Crank said. “These clerks are super people, working very hard to learn this. I saw how difficult it is to train, for instance, in the kitchen.”

Referring to the Maverik worker who led him through an assortment of preparations, from assembling a burrito to quick-cooking a pizza and portioning its slices, Crank said, “He knows that stuff and what he’s got to put in everything. It would be very hard to retrain a worker if you lost him.”

In addition, Crank said he was struck by how much of every sale he handled went to credit card processing fees and sales tax, leaving a lot less for the merchant than what went into the register.

Although his time with the fire department and visit to the Air Force wing weren’t as immersive, Crank said the experiences yielded invaluable insight into his district.

“You know what? I love it. I mean, I’ve always kind of loved watching law enforcement, but it’s really fun. The leadership at (the police department) and El Paso County Sheriff’s Office tell me how much they appreciate it when someone comes and does that — they like showing what they do.”

Whole blood 

After returning from the Aurora radio station, the rest of Crank’s day started at his district office on East Pikes Peak Avenue with the arrival of Deputy Chief De Leon and a crew of firefighters on Tower 1, ready to whisk the congressman, district representative Ashlee Springer, communications director Eve Sparks and a reporter a few blocks to the nearby Station No. 1 on South Weber Street.

De Leon, the deputy chief of support services, has been working his way up through department ranks since 1995 and now oversees human resources, training, facilities, vehicles and accreditation. Throughout the ride-along, he regaled Crank and his entourage with details about the department’s cutting-edge practices, including its recently acquired ability to deliver whole blood — instead of plasma — to the scene in traumatic emergencies, resulting in dozens of lives saved in the last year.

“One of the things that we’ve done that is unique in Colorado — and really in the country — is whole blood,” a beaming De Leon said. “We’ve had tremendous success, probably one of the most significant life-saving things that we’ve done in decades. So, we’ve got some data that shows getting the blood in these patients, that allows them to walk out of the hospital and survive those injuries. And so we’re really proud of that.”

De Leon said retired military doctors who joined the department have helped bring the practice, pioneered on the battlefield, to civilian use.

“It used to be, if you’re going to have a heart attack, have it in Colorado Springs, because we had the highest recovery rate,” De Leon said, describing practices adopted by the Colorado Springs department that shaved vital minutes off the time it took for paramedics to get a patient from a call into balloon angioplasty treatment.

“The most significant thing was that we trained our medics to a level to where they could say, ‘This is a clot,’ OK? And so by them being able to identify that, they don’t have to stop in the ER, they just go straight to the cath lab.”

The addition of its whole blood program has led to a new saying in some circles, De Leon said.

“So now, if you’re going to have a traumatic car accident, plan to have it here,” he beamed. “It definitely is one of the most significant advances we’ve seen.”

Aaron McConnellogue, a medical lieutenant, picked up the story back at Station No. 1 about an hour later, after Crank and his companions accompanied the firefighters on an emergency call to the nearby YMCA to treat a swimmer in distress, and an aborted response to another call that turned out to be a smoke alarm set off by a pan left on someone’s stove.

“It’s been pretty, been pretty incredible for our community,” McConnellogue said, adding that the department has administered 118 units of blood in the last year, with a success rate close to 70%.

Launched at a cost of roughly $300,000 funded by the UCHealth Memorial Hospital Foundation, he said the program involves $5,000 coolers to maintain the blood at the right temperature, a warmer to bring it up to body temperature, and an ultrasound to determine whether an incident requires its use. Only about 1% of fire departments or emergency services nationwide have the capability, he added, including the department in Woodland Park, which has recently put it in place.

With the startup costs covered, McConnellogue noted that continued funding to maintain the program remains a challenge.

A game-changer drone

Next on Crank’s itinerary was a visit to Fire Station No. 4 on Southgate Road, where some of the city’s wildland firefighting equipment was housed. Once there, Lieutenants TJ Bopp and Trevor Leland showed off rugged engines built to handle off-road terrain and portable pumps that can draw water at high pressure from streams and swimming pools to fight fires far from hydrants.

Wildland firefighters, they said, are specially trained to enhance teams’ capabilities with an assortment of tools, including a device that drips a diesel-gasoline mixture to set controlled burns and a shed full of chainsaws and hand implements used to clear fire lines.

The tour concluded with a look at one of the department’s three drones led by Captain JJ Halsey. Equipped with a speaker system, spotlight and infrared thermal camera, the DJI drone has proven to be a game-changer, he said, helping locate lost hikers and escaped zoo animals, as well as provide real-time overhead views of structure and wildland fires.

Having access to the drone’s live-streamed, high-definition footage makes a tremendous difference fighting wildfires, Halsey said.

“We get up in the air, and we can give them that view: OK, that fire is heading in this direction,” he said. “We can get overhead and give them specific coordinates. We can give them the layout. We can give them a good picture. Whereas before, we’re sitting in the vehicle, smoke’s blocking everything, it’s like you’re in a fog pattern, and you’re just trying to read a map and figure out, ‘Where do I need to put things?'”

Halsey related a story involving a recent building fire on the west side, when firefighters were on scene with the drone above one building when a report came in of another fire a couple blocks away.

“So, he just flew from there down to the next fire and gave a good report on what was happening, so that allowed our dispatchers to send in the right resources for that,” Halsey said. Smiling, he recounted the twist ending: “And then they realized they had an arsonist who was going down the blocks setting (fires), so he started looking for the arsonist, found him, and then directed (police) to go in, and they captured him.”

Without the drone’s capabilities, he added, responders wouldn’t have known until later that the fires were connected, but with it, they were able to avert further conflagrations and catch a suspect.

Fighting fires with C-130s

After a break for lunch at a nearby restaurant, Crank’s day continued with a visit to the 302nd Airlift Wing at Petersen, where the wing’s recently arrived commander, Col. Elissa Granderson, and her command officers briefed Crank and his district director, former state Sen. Dennis Hisey, on the unit’s mission and personnel.

Equipped with eight C-130H Hercules airplanes on hand since the 1990s — each with a payload capacity of 22 tons and a range of over 2,000 miles — the wing provides troop and equipment support into hostile areas, as well as medical evacuation and overhead fire suppression capabilities, part of the Military Aerial Fire Fighting System, known as MAFFS.

The MAFFS wing in Colorado is one of four in the Western U.S. — the others are based in Reno, Nevada; Cheyenne, Wyoming; and on the Channel Islands off the coast of California — and is the only one staffed by Air Force Reservists, with the other being Air National Guard units.

Granderson noted that she was familiarizing herself with the older H-model aircraft after having flown the newer J models for years and made a pitch for upgrading to the more advanced version. Crank recalled that his predecessor helped acquire the H models when he was a top legislative aide to U.S. Rep. Joel Hefley more than 30 years ago. He added that a group of more than a dozen House members had recently written a letter to the Pentagon, asking them to “continue cranking out” the newer model.

The briefing concluded a detailed look at how the wing can deploy its C-130s to fight fires on 48 hours’ notice, much of the time taken up with alerting and transporting National Guard members, who have full-time civilian jobs around the country. It takes about four hours to outfit the plane with a 3,000-gallon tank and nozzle system, which sprays retardant for between 5 and 8 seconds to cover roughly a quarter mile. Planes then can fly to numerous air tanker bases situated around the country to refill and head back to the fire in a matter of minutes, she said.

Following a look inside the cockpit of one of the planes, Crank and his group made their way across town to the Maverik Convenience Store on South 8th Street, where the congressman got an off-the-record tour and a chance to work behind the counters.

As the day wound down, Crank said that spending time shoulder-to-shoulder with his constituents helped him represent them in Washington. He added that had been impressed the night before, during his second ride-along with the police department, by the range of skills required to do the job.

“Last night. I was super struck by some of the calls we went on,” Crank said. “One was a little boy who was talking about committing suicide. And you saw the compassion of that officer dealing with that — and then the very next call is a fight that he’s got to break up. And just how you have to change your emotion from helping this little boy to that. I enjoy doing them. I’m going to try and do one at least every couple of months. I just think it helps keep you connected to the community. Police officers and fire fighters, they’re out in the community every day. So, it’s great way to do it.”