Task force helps out in SE Ga.
Rome-Floyd Fire Capt. Ross Wyatt and Sgt. Josh Lockridge spend the week providing disaster assistance in Camden County.
Two local firefighters returned to Rome on Thursday after being called on to assist residents of Camden County in the wake of Hurricane Irma, which cut off power and water service to thousands, took down tons of trees and flooded neighborhoods.
Rome-Floyd County Fire Department Capt. Ross Wyatt and Sgt. Josh Lockridge were deployed Sunday, along with other members of Georgia Search and Rescue Task Force 6, which is comprised of specially- certified firefighters from Northwest Georgia. The task force was sent to Kingsland, in the Southeast corner of the state, just above the border with Florida.
They had been staging in Forsyth County on Monday, ready to head out with four boats and the GSAR rig, which has a cab like a fire truck and about a 40-foot trailer, Wyatt said.
The group arrived late Monday night after driving through the tail end of the storm, Wyatt said.
It was a different type of deployment from what the team normally does; for example, they were sent to Albany in January after a tornado ravaged the city. In that case, they searched for people in a sprawling mobile home park filled with over 200 trailers, going from one trailer to the next.
But, in Camden County, door- to- door welfare checks and damage assessments were the primary tasks for the group. The welfare checks focused on seeing if residents had any immediate medical issues that could create problems without power and water services available. The assessments were reported back to county officials to calculate the extent of damage.
“You never know what you’re going to end up doing,” Wyatt said, adding that though it was not what they generally do, it was something that needed to be done to help the people there.
Every person on the task force does it because they love helping people, Wyatt said.
Wyatt said on Wednesday night that the power was slowly starting to be restored, but much of the county was still without it. According to the Georgia Power outage map, there were 2,373 properties without power Thursday night. The storm damage there was not as bad as places in Florida, where total communities were wiped out, he said.
The people of Camden County seemed to have been prepared, knowing of
what was to come far in advance, with their prior experiences playing into their readiness, Wyatt explained.
“This isn’t their first,” he said.
Eleven local firefighters in all are on the task force — not all are deployed at once. And Wyatt stresses that that’s 11 guys the department has with extra training — including confined space, building collapse and high-angle (rope) rescues — they wouldn’t get unless they
were on the task force. He enjoys the critical-thinking element of the task force’s technical work.
“You get to do stuff that we don’t do as much in Rome,” he said. “One of the things I really enjoy, pretty much you’re going to get the best from every department.”
Anyone who has been in the fire service for a while loves their job, Wyatt said. And when you combine that love with a tremendous amount of skill, “It’s fun,” he added.