information from the Seattle Fire Department

The Seattle Fire Department will put a brand new Medic Unit into service thanks to the generous donation of a West Seattle couple.

In 2012, the estate of William C. Sanders and Mildred Krahmer Sanders donated more than $550,000 to the City of Seattle to purchase two new medic units for the Seattle Fire Department.

“My aunt and uncle cared passionately for the work of the City of Seattle Fire Department and their medic program and the thousands of people that the program serves each year,” said family member Donald L. Krahmer, Jr. of Portland, Oregon who served as trustee of the estate. “The gift represents, in a small way, a payback of the huge blessing that the City of Seattle and its citizens gave both of them during their time in the Pacific Northwest.”

The Seattle Fire Department’s medic units are staffed by two firefighter/paramedics that have completed nine months of intensive medical training through the Medic One Program. The county-wide Medic One system focuses on providing first-rate pre hospital emergency care to critical patients and is known internationally as a leader in the field of emergency medicine.

The Department has a total of seven medic units assigned to fire stations throughout the City of Seattle. “As a Department, we are extremely grateful for the generosity shown by Mildred and William Sanders. The medic units and the paramedics who staff them literally save thousands of lives” said Seattle Fire Department Fire Chief Gregory Dean.

In 2012 the Seattle Fire Department Medics responded to 21,954 calls in the City of Seattle. A majority of these emergency incidents required the paramedics to utilize their advanced life support skill sets. King County is known to have one of the highest save rates in the country.

In addition to their concern for public safety, the Saunders family also felt strongly about the need to support advanced eye research. With a desire to help the growing numbers of people worldwide facing age related vision loss, they left a bequest to Research to Prevent Blindness (RPB) for the creation of the RPB Mildred Krahmer Sanders and William Clifford Sanders Laboratory for Vision Research. RPB awarded the one-time $600,000 grant to the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Florida, College of Medicine, where scientists are at the forefront of developing cures for eye related illnesses.

William C. Sanders was born in Portland, Oregon on February 25, 1922 and Mildred Sanders was born in Blooming, Oregon on the family homestead (near Hillsboro, Oregon) on January 23, 1921. Both Bill and Mildred Sanders spent their early lives in the greater Portland area, were married in 1944 and then moved to the Seattle area where William Sanders worked as an aerospace engineer later retiring as an executive in foreign engineering technology. Mildred served in variety of engineering support activities ending her career as the librarian and manager of the Boeing engineering library. The couple enjoyed traveling the world. On retirement, the couple moved to West Seattle where they enjoyed a skyline view of the city of Seattle and the Seattle Harbor. William Sanders predeceased Mildred on September 28, 2002. Mildred Sanders passed away on April 6, 2011.