Essex Rescue News Briefs

Courtesy Burlington Free Press

ESSEX -- Vermont ambulances are on the road and heading to Texas, where they will be available if needed when Hurricane Rita roars ashore.

A caravan of 14 ambulance units departed from Brattleboro on Thursday afternoon, part of statewide response to a request made by the Federal Emergency Management Agency late Wednesday night. In preparation for Hurricane Rita's landfall sometime today, FEMA asked that 250 ambulances from throughout the United States embark on trips to the Gulf Coast, where they will be on hand to provide up to 30 days of emergency support.

Dan Manz, emergency medical services director for the Vermont Department of Health, said state officials learned at 5:15 a.m. Thursday that the request for ambulances and crews would extend as far north as Vermont. Rescue agencies throughout the state were contacted shortly thereafter, he said, and ambulances were pulling out of stations several hours later, he said.

As Rita churned in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday afternoon, Manz said the exact tasks facing Vermont crews were uncertain. They were going to travel about 1,800 miles to Houston's Reliant Stadium and see what would be needed, he said. If the aftermath of the recent Hurricane Katrina were any indication, however, crews were most likely to be on call to relocate patients from at-risk medical facilities or to provide 911 support in communities hit by the storm, Manz said.

The agencies contacted Thursday had volunteered for hurricane relief several weeks earlier. When FEMA made a similar request in response to Hurricane Katrina , officials compiled a list of ambulance services able to assist. Although that request was never extended to Vermont, Manz said the information proved timely Thursday.

"It was a little bit of work that we did in response to Katrina that turned out not needed," Manz said Thursday. "It's now paying some dividends in terms of how nimble we were able to be today."

Greg Wolf, an EMT for Essex Rescue and a junior high science teacher in South Burlington, said he had received permission to leave school for two weeks in case he was needed for Katrina. After receiving the call Thursday morning, he modified the details. Texas, instead of Mississippi.

"So I was already pretty well set," the Underhill resident said as he, Tony Willey and Jeffrey Friedman finished a briefing with Craig Butkus, director of operations for Essex Rescue. Wolf, Willey and Friedman left Essex Rescue's station about 1 p.m. Thursday; there is a roster of 11 others willing to take their places in about a week, said Karen Danaher, president of the rescue service.

"There's a huge network of support," Danaher said. Other Essex Rescue members have volunteered to cover extra shifts; child care will be provided for the families of those making the trip, she said. The response, she said, was instantaneous. The fast turnaround carried over to Richmond, where three volunteers climbed into Richmond Rescue's second ambulance and left for Houston, rescue member Christopher Carfaro said. "They were loading up all the supplies you could think of, and a little group of people sent them off. It's real touching," Carfaro said early Thursday afternoon.

Those remaining in Richmond also were volunteering to cover shift vacancies to do their part to help, he said.

Courtesy WCAX-TV News

Essex Junction, Vermont -- September 22, 2005A convoy of 14 Vermont EMS crews from all over Vermont headed to  Houston Thursday afternoon, where FEMA has an emergency response staging area at Reliant Stadium. They will have two missions: to evacuate patients from hospitals and nursing homes, and to provide emergency backup for local teams. One of the crews is from the Essex Ambulance service.Essex Ambulance EMTs scrambled when the seven a-m call came from FEMA requesting one of its two units and an EMT crew to head to Houston. They had to bef ully prepared to operate without electricity or water. It took four houres to Get the rig ready to roll to Houston. That was the hard part. Finding the volunteer crew was easy.

"We all saw what happened with Katrina. God only knows what's going to happen down there. Let's hope it's not as bad but we'll see what we can do to help," said Tony Willey, one of the Essex EMT volunteers going to Houston.

It took just 15 minutes for veteran EMTs Tony Willey, Greg Wolf, and Jeff Friedman to volunteer for the Rita assignment. Willey got a leave from his employer, General Dynamics; Wolf from his eighth-grade teaching post at the Tuttle Middle School in South Burlington, and Friedman from IBM. They all leave families behind for the assignment that could to four weeks.

"It makes me feel very good about myself to give back to the community like this and in this case, the country," said Wolf. "To be in this kind of service you have to be the type of person that wants to serve your community , wants to give back to fellow Americans in need and it's a perfect opportunity to do so and I'm with two great guys," said Friedman.And with that, the trio said their farewells and piled in for the drive south ready for the 1,800 mile trip to Houston, ready for whatever Rita will bring.

Eleven other members of the Essex squad also volunteered for the hurricane mission. Some of them might be rotated in as replacements if the crew is needed in Texas for an extended period.

Brian Joyce - Channel 3 News