Last week, a man died on West Main Street. After he swerved off the street, onto the sidewalk, crushing a bench in front of the Turnage Theatre and hitting a tree, he was unresponsive and had no pulse when bystanders pulled him from the vehicle.

A confluence of events determined that the man lived.

How?

It started with witnesses rushing into neighboring businesses asking if anyone knew CPR. It continued with three women, an ER nurse, another registered nurse and a yoga instructor answering that call. It further continued with others showing up to get into the rotation of doing chest compressions on the man. The incident came to a head as Washington Fire-Rescue-EMS arrived with a defibrillator and provided three shocks to stimulate his non-beating heart. It ended with the man being taken to the hospital alive and trying to breathe on his own.

That man is lucky to be alive.

There are many reasons he is. From telecommunicators determining the nature of the emergency once the 911 call was made, to sheriff’s office employees running on foot to the scene, to paramedics racing from other emergencies, including an out-of-hospital birth in process — all contributed to saving a life.

According to the American Heart Association, for every minute that CPR and defibrillation do not occur after cardiac arrest, the victim’s chance of survival decreases by 7-10 percent. If it takes first responders six minutes to get to a cardiac arrest victim, then already that person’s chance of survival has dropped to between 40 and 58 percent.

The fact that random people, who had never seen one another in their lives, teamed up to do chest compressions in those first moments of cardiac arrest is likely the most important reason why that man was still alive when he was lifted off the West Main Street sidewalk.

One of the women who performed CPR that day said later that she never thought she’d use the skills she’d learned in CPR class. She assumed that if someone was in cardiac arrest, that somebody else would know how to do it and take over.

She learned otherwise last Thursday: it takes a team to do chest compressions the right way, and one can’t count on somebody else doing the job.

It underscores the importance for everyone to learn the very basic lifesaving skill of CPR. It’s not difficult, though it does require some exertion.

Look it up. Take a class. Learn how to do it.

It might just save a life.