Angels among us

 

Fighting fires is physically, intellectually, and sometimes emotionally demanding. Unlike firefighters on TV who extinguish a complicated blaze and are back in the firehouse by the end of the commercial break, in the real world, fires and other emergency response activities often take many hours and people to resolve.

Fires happen at any time, regardless of weather conditions. Often the elements pose as much of a hazard to responders as the incident.

Fighting Goochland fires in recent extreme condition

                                                    (Goochland fire-rescue images)

Ensuring that firefighters have support to recover and recharge from battling a blaze is vital. Agencies with limited personnel resources like Goochland are blessed to have backup in these situations from the Metro Richmond flying Squad.

D. E. “Eddie” Ferguson, Jr. Chief of Goochland Fire-Rescue and Emergency Services introduced Chief Rick Talley of the Flying Squad at the February 3 supervisors’ meeting. Talley explained the mission of his organization. A display of some of the Flying Squad’s equipment was set up in the admin building parking lot before the meeting.

Chief Rick Talley

Talley, a retired Chesterfield Fire & EMS battalion chief is a longtime friend and colleague of Ferguson. Talley has also been very active as a volunteer firefighter and district chief in Hanover County, so he understands both sides of the equation and what it takes for rural counties to provide fire and emergency medical services.

The service provided to Goochland Fire-Rescue by the Flying Squad is invaluable, said Ferguson.

Talley said that the Metro Richmond Flying Squad is an all-volunteer responder rehab agency with 38 response volunteers.  It is 100 percent funded as a 501 c (3) non-profit organization. Its membership includes active and retired duty responders both law enforcement and fire, as well as business owners, housewives, retirees, and regular citizens with a servant’s heart who want to help the community.

The Metro Richmond Flying Squad serves eight municipalities covering 2013 square miles from six response stations. They are Goochland, Richmond, Henrico, Hanover, New Kent, Hopewell, Powhatan, and Chesterfield. In 2025, the Squad ran 437 calls for service, 11 of those in Goochland.

Talley explained that rehab and recovery is an intervention designed to mitigate “the things that are messing with firefighters’ physical, physiological, and emotional stress” to sustain a member’s energy, improve performance, and decrease the likelihood of on scene injury or death.  Rehab reduces workers comp claims by fixing things to prevent injury.

When responders get fatigued and become dehydrated, they do not function as well. “That’s when we step in and work on the recovery phase to return the member’s physiological and psychological states to levels that enable them to perform additional emergency tasks, be reassigned, or be released from the scene with no adverse effects.”

The Flying Squad operates under protocols established by the National Fire Protection Association standards of dealing with firefighter health and wellness. These include relief from extreme climate and incident conditions; carcinogen removal and reduction before eating or drinking anything; rest and recovery; rehydration; replacement of calories and electrolytes; active or passive cooling or heating depending on incident types and climatic conditions; and medical assessment and monitoring.

Instant relief from scene conditions can vary. In warm weather conditions, measures, including cooling vests, are needed to quickly reduce body temperature. In cold weather firefighters sweat inside their bunker gear and chill rapidly when they stop working the blaze. The Squad sets up warming tents and has heated vests to counteract hypothermia.  On multi casualty incidents like a plane crash, they need relief from visuals of the carnage provided by a tent. Something as simple as providing dry socks is important during extended operations.

The two big killers of firefighters said Tally are cancer and cardiac events. Flying Squad members address those when they arrive on scene with hydration supplies and carcinogen reduction materials. Dehydration causes a reduction in bodily fluids, which makes the heart blood vessels thicker and blood pressure increases to counteract the depletion. “We start rehydrating them withing three to five minutes, the heart rate and blood pressure comes down, and we reset the cardiac event clock.

“To prevent absorption of carcinogens through the skin, we make firefighters clean up before eating or drinking to avoid inadvertently ingesting them.”

Tally quote the NFPA standard, “rehab is needed and required any time that firefighters are working strenuously without SCBA (self-contained breathing apparatus) for more than 40 minutes or after the completion of one SCBA cylinder (air bottle), when operating in extreme weather conditions, and during physically or emotionally stressful incident.”

When the Flying Squad is working on an emergency scene where law enforcement is involved, it has an occupant services protocol for people displaced by a house fire that takes care of them as they await the arrival of the Red Cross or similar agencies. It also established an animal rehab protocol, the first in North America, for responder and civilian animals rescued from fires.  

“The bottom line,” said Talley, “is that we take care of our responders and their needs because they have to go to the next scene and the next one. It’s real good stuff. I’m very proud of what we do and where we ‘ve come from,” Talley said of the organization founded in 2017.” We’re here for the firefighters, the citizens, whoever needs us. We’re always looking to continue moving forward we don’t ever sit on our laurels. We’re constantly looking for ways to improve.”

The Flying Squad worked six fires on the Saturday before the storm hit and seven fires the next Saturday and a few in between. The volunteers showed up and never complained, said Talley.

He thanked the supervisors for their support, which included donation of surplus fire-rescue vehicles.

Please visit the Richmond Flying Squad to learn more about its wonderful work at https://rvaflyingsquad.com/.