With a 2,500-pound tractor pinning down both shoulders and his left ribcage, Orville Johnson, 66, said he thought about his loved ones, whether he was going to die and if someone was going to find him in time.

Explaining this, he got choked up. It made him expand his chest, aggravating his broken ribs. He began to hold his chest and wince in pain.

He spent six days in the hospital and got out last Wednesday, with a broken jaw, broken ribs and a badly cut ear.

On July 24, he had been mowing with his tractor on an incline, as he had done for 30 years, when he felt his tractor lift into the air. He said some people say a tumble like that will seem to go slowly, but the next thing Johnson knew he was pinned under the side of his tractor.

A neighbor, Todd Stadheim, drove by and saw Johnson’s tractor turned over, and he said he was concerned about whether Johnson was underneath it. Once he saw Johnson trapped, he called 9-1-1.

Johnson said he owes his life first to Stadheim, and then to the volunteer first-responder units from Clarks Grove and Manchester that arrived at the scene minutes after Stadheim’s 9-1-1 call.

With ambulances stationed at Albert Lea Medical Center, it can take longer than 15 minutes for paramedics to get out to a scene in the outlying county, said Don Hauge, emergency services coordinator for ALMC. The 11 first-responder units throughout Freeborn County have more proximity to accidents, and more knowledge of the specific areas, giving them the ability to make it to an emergency first.

First-responder Caralie Squires of Manchester’s volunteer fire department received a page on the afternoon of the accident. She listened to the message, and she and her boss ran to the nearby fire station, which is two miles away from where Johnson was pinned, and got their emergency equipment. They drove to the scene not knowing what to expect. When they got there, another volunteer firefighter was already helping Stadheim use a tractor to move the tractor off Johnson.

He had trouble breathing because of the pressure on his chest. There was a pool of blood and Squires said she didn’t know its source. There was a pool of gasoline that could have ignited.

As the tractor was lifted off, she held Johnson’s head and neck still in case it was broken. She began talking to Johnson about his three-year-old grandson, as he began to lose consciousness.

She said the ambulance got there within five or ten minutes. She said it was the kind of accident where another five or ten minutes could have made a serious difference in Johnson’s condition.

Hauge said first responders make a difference particularly in cases of cardiac arrest, where ten minutes can be the difference between life or death.

&uot;We’re confident that we save lives because of what early responders do in the county,&uot; he said.

Johnson agrees with that, and is grateful to responders and to the employers who allow them to take off work for their volunteerism.

Johnson himself used to be a volunteer firefighter for 18 years, and said if he were younger and more agile he’d still be doing it.

(Contact Tim Sturrock at tim.sturrock@albertleatribune.com or 379-3438.)