Fire and ambulance workers never know when they’ll get a call to a fire, crime or crash but Waterloo EMT Jason Kayser was surprised to get a call Monday and discover the victims of a crash on a rural highway were very familiar.Often people in the Waterloo fire department do respond to situations involving people they know, but he says volunteering in a small town probably 80-percent of the time it’s people you’re acquainted with — though you never expect it’s going to be your parents. His mother and father suffered nonfatal injuries in the crash, a little after noon on Monday, and he learned they were involved only when he arrived in an ambulance at the scene. Kayser works as a full-time firefighter in Waterloo, but he’s also a volunteer in the tiny town of Fairbank about 10 miles southwest of there, where he lives. The volunteers were paged to a “mass casualty” event south of Fairbanks and he was on call for ambulance duty but only when they got out there did he discover that it was his parents involved in the accident. A woman who works at a Waterloo hospital happened to be the first motorist upon the scene of the crash. She helped call the emergency workers and Kayser says his dad told the off-duty nurse that his son would likely be among the first responders.They airlifted his mother, 59-year-old Patricia Kayser, to the Waterloo hospital and his dad, 62-year-old Thomas Kayser, was taken by ground ambulance. He’s in surgery “right now” for a crushed hand and has a small hip fracture, and his mother has a bruised lung and broken collarbone. Kayser says his folks were belted in when another driver ran a stop sign at the intersection of two county roads. The other driver, identified as 61-year-old Marcia Miller of Oelwein, died in the crash. He says the visibility’s very bad that intersection, with a grain bin nearby and especially now the corn’s tall. Kayser also serves as a member of the city council in Fairbank, which has a population of about 11-hundred people.
