On a warm afternoon last August, Altoona, Pa., Local 2273 member James Burley gave his wife, Kim, a special one-week-early present for their 30th wedding anniversary.

He saved her life.

“We were at home trying to watch something on Netflix, and it wasn’t loading,” recalled Burley, an electrician with Norfolk Southern Railroad’s Juniata Locomotive Shop.

While Kim called the customer support number for help, James went out on their recently stained back patio deck. “I’d just kicked a big splinter off, so I figured, while I’m waiting, I’ll glue it back on,” Burley said. 

That’s when he heard what sounded like Kim’s drink hitting the floor.

“I looked up and saw she’d slumped over in her chair,” Burley said. “I did not hear a gasp, a sigh, a moan. If I wasn’t in earshot, I would never have known.”

He rushed inside to check on her. “I was trying to get her to come to, but she wasn’t coming around.”

One of the Burleys’ neighbors, who had heard James’ efforts to revive his wife, ran over and offered to help.

“I said, ‘Yeah, call 911,’” Burley said. “Thank goodness for her. It allowed me to do what I needed to do.”

As the neighbor was speaking with the operator, Burley told her to tell them, “Her breathing’s getting really shallow.”

The operator instructed the neighbor to tell Burley to lay his wife on the floor, and they offered to walk him through administering CPR.

“Taking the CPR courses and working on the dummy, I thought, ‘Will I ever really know what to do when the time comes?’”

_{– Altoona, Pa., Local 2273’s James Burley}

But Burley, who receives regular workplace recertifications on the life-saving technique, had already begun performing the prescribed chest compressions and rescue breaths on his wife. He was still at it when EMTs arrived a few minutes later.

“They hit her with a defibrillator, and they used a LUCAS machine for doing compressions” before taking her to a nearby hospital, he said.

“All in all, Kim had been down for about 22 minutes,” said Burley, who recalled a nurse with the intensive care unit telling him and his three children later that evening that, as far as Kim’s condition was concerned, they needed to be prepared for anything.

In the ICU, “Kim had a breathing tube down her throat and IVs in her arms,” he said. Three times, “She opened her eyes and she looked at me, she looked at one arm, then the other, then up at me like, ‘What the hell happened?’ and fell back asleep.”

“It took a while for his wife’s memory to come back,” Burley said.

“They said she just went into cardiac arrest,” he said. “No rhyme or reason, no heart attack, no blockage. They even checked for tick-borne illnesses, but her heart had just stopped.”

Burley said his wife recovered quickly from the ordeal. “Two weeks after it happened, you wouldn’t even know it — other than the fact that I did break her ribs” while administering CPR, he said. She also has a scar where a pacemaker was implanted.

“Taking the CPR courses and working on the dummy, I thought, ‘Will I ever really know what to do when the time comes?’” Burley said. “When EMS showed up, they did everything they could to get her heartbeat back,” he said. “But they said that CPR being started immediately definitely helped.”

Burley has been a member of Local 2273 since 2005. “I had 15 years in another job before I came to the railroad,” he said. “It was long hours out of town, and a lot of overtime just to make a decent paycheck.”

He was grateful when an IBEW-​represented opportunity to work for Norfolk Southern opened. “I was tired of working out of town,” he said, “and this was a Monday-through-Friday job, with better money and a good retirement.”

Burley said he’s done it all at the Juniata shop, working on generators and locomotive traction motors. He now runs the ovens in the varnish vat. 

“Best job I ever had,” he said.

Local 2273 Recording Secretary Rod Swope was hired by Norfolk Southern at the same time as Burley and has known him well since. “He’s a pretty humble guy,” Swope said. “He doesn’t consider himself a hero, but I don’t know how he can look at that any other way.”

A few months later, Burley was honored with an IBEW Life Saving Award after his brother-in-law, a machinist at the Juniata shop, told his friend Dan Dorsch, a former Local 2273 president, what had happened. Dorsch passed the information along to Kevin Beers, the current president, who submitted Burley’s name to the International Office for award consideration — along with a supporting letter from the brother-in-law.

“To have the ability to do something like that, I think that’s pretty incredible,” Beers said.

Burley admitted that timing was everything. “Every time I look at Kim, I think I could have been on the front porch and I’d have never heard anything,” he said.

“If you’re not trained, I highly suggest that you take a CPR course,” he said. “I didn’t think it would be me. You just never know.”

To learn about the IBEW’s Life Saving Awards, visit the Safety & Health page at ibew.org.