Encinitas residents can learn hands-only CPR for free next week at a local fire station, part of a San Diego County campaign that just crossed a major threshold: more than 1 million people trained.
A Sidewalk CPR session is scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 3, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Encinitas Fire Station #5, 540 Balour Dr., during the Encinitas Fire Open House. The event is one of dozens planned countywide in October as part of Ready to Respond Training Month.
The Revive & Survive San Diego campaign reached 1,011,034 people trained as of August 2026, surpassing its original goal, the County News Center reported Monday, Sept. 28. The County of San Diego and UC San Diego's Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science launched the initiative in January 2024.
Across the county, 49 partner organizations hosted 25,138 free training events. Schools, fire departments, health centers and businesses all participated, according to the County News Center. The largest single event trained 1,651 students at Rancho Del Rey Middle School in the Sweetwater Union High School District, UC San Diego reported.
Natasha Martin, a professor of medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine, used simulation modeling to estimate the training's impact. Over five years, she projects more than 1,600 additional bystanders will perform CPR, a 40% increase, and roughly 400 additional lives will be saved.
The numbers already show progress. In 2025, 46% of people who suffered out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in the county received bystander CPR before first responders arrived, according to UC San Diego. When the campaign launched in 2024, county data showed only 8% of cardiac arrest patients in 2021 were successfully revived and survived, though that figure measures survival, not the rate of bystander CPR.
San Diego County Fire Director Jeff Collins said in the county's announcement that brain death begins within four to six minutes of cardiac arrest without CPR. For every minute it is delayed, the chances of survival drop 7% to 10%.
The technique requires two steps: call 911, then push hard and fast on the person's bare chest at 100 to 120 beats per minute. No mouth-to-mouth breathing is needed.
One survivor's story illustrates the stakes. Tim Winter, a musician, collapsed during a party near Mission Beach in April 2025 after going into cardiac arrest. His bandmate Wes Inskeep, a retired Navy SEAL and former firefighter, performed CPR for 15 minutes until paramedics arrived. Winter received 72 minutes of total CPR before being placed on a heart-lung machine and spent two weeks in a medically induced coma.
He recovered.
Winter and his family later completed CPR training themselves. "The goal isn't to become a hero," Winter said in a UC San Diego feature. "The goal is to save someone's life."
Encinitas residents can sign up for the Oct. 3 training and find other sessions at revivesurvive.ucsd.edu.
