New Radio System will Improve Communication & Response Times – How it will help Rescue Squad
The Hancock County Fiscal Court approved new radio system upgrades for all of the county’s emergency and protective services last year, as reported by the Hancock Clarion. Once the P-25 digital upgrade is completed, it will allow for much better communication and faster response times.
Judge/Executive Johnny Roberts said in his speech at the Chamber of Commerce Breakfast/State of the County in January this year, “When you call 9-11 anywhere in Kentucky, you need to be heard and we need to be able to respond, and I think this is going to really impact that. It’s a joint venture with our school system, so they’ll be on the same system.”
Director of Hancock County Emergency Management Kyle Veach said the original installation date was going to be early fall, but stated that they are “cautiously optimistic” it will be sooner, maybe as soon as late summer of this year.
“Compared to what we have had,” Veach said, “which our system we have currently is antiquated, it will be daylight and dark. This will be a complete new installation from the ground up, from the pagers and radios people carry, all the way to the equipment that will be on the towers. And, we’ll actually be adding more tower sites to get better coverage throughout the county.
We have these apps that we currently use, as a secondary and a tertiary plan, in case there are radio issues, that allows emergency personnel to get alerts to their phones and also to be able to hear communications across their phones, just in case there is an issue with the pager and radio system. And, that’s if they can get a cell phone signal, and then you’re at the mercy of your cell phone provider.”
The Hancock County Rescue Squad has been challenged with receiving pages in a timely manner if at all, not just due to the older system, but also because many of the members now work out of town, and some in factories that won’t allow them to take their pagers or cell phones into the building while they’re at work. In the past, many of the members were local farmers, and were usually in the county and could receive word and respond quickly.
This has created a real problem with the rescue squad being able to respond quickly, such as with the truck wreck that happened recently involving 2 HCHS students, where the Jaws Of Life (JOL) was needed in order to free student Clark Roach from the passenger side and get him to the hospital.
Hancock Clarion owner and reporter Donn Wimmer arrived at that scene, and said that on the scanner they usually call out all of the emergency services in the county. “I didn’t see any sign of the rescue squad there,” Wimmer said, “and that was pretty shocking, to me. I didn’t know what in the world was going on. They couldn’t get the door off. The Hawesville Volunteer Fire Department had the JOL. The question I have is, ‘What happened that day?’”
Hancock County Rescue Squad Chief Kenny Stuart answered, “On our end, we didn’t get the page. And, we had a lot of members who worked day shift that day.
Going through our roster, we have 10 pagers issued, 17 members, and we have 2 spare pagers we’re getting ready to have issued-out. We just didn’t have enough. We’re trying to get more through EOC (dispatch) now.
Of course, we’re getting ready to get all new equipment across the county. A lot of the older pagers that are out there, some of them don’t work anymore, and they’ve been turned in and new ones have been handed out. They’re a little thin.
I’ve talked to some of my members, some of them did get the page, and some of them didn’t. A lot of them are starting to use apps on their phones now. The ones that don’t have pagers, they’ve got a new app on their phone that will take and get all of the calls. That’s good if you’re getting a signal, or if their phone is not dead.
There are parts of the county where the radios don’t even work very well. Our dispatch radios don’t even work very well. We’re working on all of that, trying to get it settled and squared away, and see what’s going on.”
Stuart, 52, has been with the squad since he was only 18. They currently have 17 members. “They all participate well,” he said, “depending on their work schedules. We’ve got 2 or 3 more people getting ready to be applicants. They’ve got to go through background checks, and then we’ll bring them in, approve them, and we’ll give them the training here.”
He said they have enough knowledge and experience to train new members there, themselves. His wife, Melinda (Wheatley) Stuart, is the oldest member of the squad. Members meet once a month and train once a month, on two different evenings.
He said it is hard to get them there all at once, because some members work day shifts, some work 3rd shift, and he himself works the day shift at Waupaca.
“Their initial training,” Stuart said, “they start out going through the trucks and learning all of the tools and where they are located on each one of the trucks, because before they are allowed to work on-scene, we have to make sure they’re proficient.
So, us older guys, whenever we get on-scene, they’ll help us get the tools out, and go and run and grab tools because they understand where they are at.
And, then we’ll start training them on the instrumentation aspect of it, and when they get proficient, we can stand back and say, ‘O.k., here’s your car wreck, you go do it.’ Whenever they’re proficient enough to do that, then we’ll go ahead and say, ‘You can start making your runs, one hundred percent, without me having to stand over top of you.’”
As far as the runs they’ve made over the last year, Stuart said it has been “quite a few.” However, he said that they haven’t made all of the runs they were called-out to, because 90 percent of the time they get canceled. “It’s part of the deal,” he said. “They call everybody out, and then when someone gets there, they can cancel.”
When asked about their quickest response times, Stuart replied: “If my wife and I are the closest ones, and we only live 2 miles, so we have a truck on the road in a matter of minutes. Some are in Lewisport, and there’s no truck down there (the only HC Rescue Squad Station is in Hawesville).
If we were to have another location, I’d say put it on the back side of the county, because that’s the farthest point. We can cover Lewisport from here, but it would be better off, I think, if we had a sister department.” He said he hasn’t yet talked to the fiscal court about a second station.
In the 34 years he’s been a member, he said they’ve answered major calls where they were much needed. “That would be older ones,” he said. “I can think of a few, head-on collisions that we’ve worked, and they were pretty rough, and we absolutely had to be there.
We have two sets of JOL, and two pumps, 2 of everything on 2 trucks. We were having to use every tool in the toolbox. They were really bad. One was in a small, red S10. She was on her way to tell her parents about her being pregnant and she got into a car wreck. In the process of getting her out, she made it through, and the baby made it through and is now 16. Somebody was looking out for her that day.
We make quite a few river runs too. Most of those are going out and getting stranded boaters. Not recently, we haven’t, luckily. We have 2 boats. We can launch one here, and take one to Lewisport and launch, depending on where they are on the river. Normally, it’s just a broke down boat, or it’s out of fuel, and we carry a fuel can with us.
If someone is in the water, we normally have divers. They’re in the dive team here in the county. They’ll be notified and we can carry them with us, and we’ll use our side scan sonar. We’ve got life rings, and those of us that can all operate the boats, can also swim. So, we just get there as fast as we can and take floats and ropes.”
Stuart was one of the Century Aluminum employees who was laid-off due to their temporary shut-down. Working at Waupaca now, he said it takes him much longer to get to the station in Hawesville, compared to when he worked in the county.
He said that if members get a page, “Some of them are working far enough away that they wouldn’t be able to make it in time. A lot of people don’t work here in the county. Some of them are working all the way up at the cabinet place, by Dale. Quite a few work in Owensboro. These younger kids, the plants aren’t always hiring to where they can get in, so they’ve got to go farther away for work.
There are some of them (factories) out there that won’t (let you take in your pager) because I’ve heard of them. I have not experienced all of them myself. We need to sit down and go through and find out which ones will and which ones won’t.
We’re doing the best we can with what we have, and we’re trying to get more members on other work schedules, that live here in the county, so that we can make better response times and more responses.
Even though you might have 20 members, if half of them are all on day shift, and a couple of them might be out of town, it’s hard for a full crew to get here.
You can run with 2. We like to have 4. You have to have at least two, one for the tool operator and one for the pump operator. The pump runs the tools. We use hydraulic tools, and equipment for cutting and spreading – the JOL. We still use hydraulic tools, we don’t use battery powered.”
They are the only department in the county that has air bags for lifting, Stuart said. “Say there’s a coil of steel or a coil of paper from one of the mills,” he said, “that fell on somebody. We can actually slip a little air bag underneath there, it’s only about an inch thick, and lift it with air. We’ve used it to pick up cars off of people.
We had an older set, and I used it to lift a car off the boy that was tangled up in a barbed wire fence under the vehicle. We lifted the vehicle up, and crimped it up and kept it off of him while we could get under there to cut the barbed wire to get him out.
Since then, they’ve realized the value of an air bag, and now we’ve got a big system. We’ve got multiple bags and we can stack them and lift higher, and lift heavier things.”
Both trucks have air bags, and he explained further how those are used. “We have them in different sizes, to be able to get in a good spot to keep the center of mass to the center of the bag to lift the vehicle,” he said. “If the big bag won’t fit, even though it’ll lift higher, you can go down to a smaller bag to get the center of mass in the right spot, and then use the next smaller bag again and lift two at once to be able to get your lift height.
You don’t want to go any more than two bags high, and then just limit it on how big each bag will lift. We also have 4x4s, and do a ‘fox cribbing’ where we crib-up to keep it more stable.”
The electrical fort on the trucks is a battery set-up with a big power inverter, so squad members can use electrical tools if they need to. The back of the trucks are equipped with back boards, spine boards and chain saws, etc.
“We even have brooms to clean up after the scene is over,” he said. “We have porta-powers (smaller hydraulic tools), in case needed. We can use those where some of our big hydraulic tools won’t fit.
We have small back boards, rope, extra medical gear for ourselves, when we need it. We have a can of water for anytime, when on-scene, or if we’re gonna be on-scene in time, we always bring sub-water flares, extra gloves, neck braces and neck rolls.
We don’t do medical, but we always like to have extra with us in case it’s a multi-scene, and we can get it to the medics faster if we have some extra on our own truck. We’ve got climbing rope, rappel rope. I’ve never, luckily, had to use that.”
The rescue squad’s JOL units consist of: a combo cutter/spreader, a big spreader, and a big cutter. “Say if you’re spreading a vehicle door,” he said, “once you get pressure on that, these things clamp down and spread so tight that you can almost let go of them. They’ll have so much pressure on them, they’ll set still.”
Stuart said there aren’t as many rescue squads as there used to be across the state of Kentucky, and that most of them have been absorbed into fire departments. “I just really don’t want to see it happen here,” he said. “I enjoy the fact that we’re different. We’re our own group. We’ve got different regulations that we go by, other than they do.”
By Jennifer Wimmer