A local Maple Valley man is alive and well thanks to Fred Meyer employees that stepped up and performed CPR on him.

The assistant store manager, David Seitz, was one of the people there who helped when a man went into cardiac arrest. He said one of the associates said “Hey David, there’s something going on over here.”

“I paused for a second,” David explained. “Then (I) called 911 and had my team block the area off.”

From that point on, Seitz said he stood out in the front of the Maple Valley Fred Meyer to wait for the ambulance to get there and then led them to the man in cardiac arrest.

While waiting for the ambulance, a bystander and other employees jumped into action.

“A customer and our pharmacy tech jumped in to do chest compressions,” Seitz said. “Then from there we just kind of pushed everyone back, kept an open line for the paramedics and the paramedics came in and resuscitated him.”

Maple Valley Fire and Life Safety Fire Chief Aaron Tyerman said the fast action that the employees and customer did are what saved that man’s life.

“For every minute that passes without somebody doing chest compressions your chances of survival drop by about 10 percent,” Tyerman said. “So people getting in early, doing CPR is truly the difference between somebody surviving and somebody not surviving.”

On May 2, Tyerman honored the “fast acting employees” with a certificate for helping save the man’s life.

According to University of Washington’s Department of Medicine, King County is one of the best places to have a cardiac arrest.

“The Seattle King County area has the highest cardiac survival rate in the world. What that’s accredited to is the community members, the number of people in the community that are trained to do CPR,” Tyerman said.

The UW medicine website said the average cardiac arrest survival rate outside of the hospital in the United States is 5 to 10 percent. In Seattle/King County the outside hospital survival rate is 19.9 percent.

“So across the country, the number of people that are actually trained in CPR is actually fairly low compared to where we are,” Tyerman said. “It is the expectation that you know how to do CPR, which is why we do CPR in schools, teach CPR at the fire departments. What we find is actually the exception and not the rule that we’ll go across a person in cardiac arrest and somebody isn’t doing CPR. Almost every time that we go out, somebody from the community, a family member is doing CPR, which is why our cardiac survival rates are so high.”

Seitz said the best part of the whole situation was that the man’s son came back into the store to let them know that his dad was home from the hospital.

“That was pretty cool,” Seitz said.