In good hands
Every Wednesday morning on North Country Public Radio, news host Martha Foley talks with Enterprise Managing Editor Peter Crowley about what’s going on in the Tri-Lakes area. This week, the chosen topic was a recent string of summer tragedies, but instead of just recounting what had happened, Martha wanted to know how these accidents affect local first responders. Does it put a strain on the emergency medical services?
That’s a good question, and the Enterprise hadn’t reported the answer to it recently, so Peter had to do some research. Here’s what he found.
On a personal level, these accidents absolutely affect first responders. Brian Freeborn, an EMT with the Lake Placid Volunteer Ambulance Service, said when a patient dies, the attending EMT or paramedic feels it as if it was a friend or family member. Brian wasn’t on the calls for two recent deaths that made headlines in the Lake Placid area — one of heatstroke at the Whiteface Sky Race and the other of a heart attack while boating on Mirror Lake — but he has experienced death on the job and has taken advantage of counseling that’s available to EMTs who experience trauma.
It’s good such services are available. Leaving that emotional strain not dealt with is the recipe for burnout.
The other question is, organizationally, do fatal accidents such as these overburden the local network of emergency services, considering the large influx of visitors to the Adirondacks every summer? The answer is, it depends.
We have seen local emergency services beef up over the last decade or so. County 911 services built modern telecommunications networks and new dispatching hubs, taking over dispatching duties for local police, fire and rescue squads. It used to be that every local agency dispatched its own; now those squads leave it to the counties and save their personnel for field duty.
The Saranac Lake Volunteer Fire Department used to do all the rescue calls as well as fire calls for a large area, entirely with volunteer EMTs and with only local tax revenue to pay for it. A few years ago the fire department spun off the Saranac Lake Volunteer Rescue Squad, a separate agency that still uses dozens of volunteers but also has 14 paid staff members, according to its website. Lake Placid’s ambulance service has at least that many paid staff.
Longtime Saranac Lake fire Chief Brendan Keough confirmed that these local squads have greatly enhanced their equipment and technology, and that they are working together better than ever with each other and with county and state agencies. He said that was prompted by major storms such as Hurricane Irene in 2012, and he credited Gov. Andrew Cuomo for prioritizing emergency preparedness.
All this suggests these local squads are pretty well equipped to handle the volume of calls, even though it sometimes gets busy. But just this week, we received a press release in which Julie Harjung, a leader with the Saranac Lake rescue squad squad and a lieutenant with the state forest rangers, talked about a serious shortage of EMTs, locally and nationwide. That would be a concern, except that the press release came from North Country Community College and was about the school’s new EMT training program, which just graduated its first class of 20 and promises many more like it.
Problem stated, problem solved — right?
OK, it may not be quite as simple as that, but we are very glad to see our local community college step up to train the next generation of people who will rush us to the hospital when we’re sick or hurt. These are good careers, satisfying to one’s conscience, serving one’s home community. We are grateful to anyone who chooses this line of work and glad the community backs them with jobs, training, funding and emotional support.
This EMT program also fits Saranac Lake’s heritage as a historic medical hub, as well as its current role as home to the area’s biggest hospital.
We are glad to learn that local emergency services are up to the task here in the Adirondacks. God bless them.