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SALISBURY —In the past eight weeks the Salisbury Volunteer Ambulance Service (SVAS) has been called into action for two life-and-death emergencies. Both were covered in the pages of local newspapers — but much of the work the squad does never makes the news, and many people in town don’t know much about the men and women volunteers who keep them safe.
Members of the all-volunteer squad are on call 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. SVAS is dispatched for everything from lift assists (helping a person who has fallen and can’t get up but is not injured) to critical care situations where the LifeStar helicopter may be called in to transport a patient to another facility. Whatever the call, a team of two or more EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians) will arrive on the scene in an ambulance ready to assist.
EMT class begins Aug. 27
On Thursday, Aug. 27, Jacquie Rice, chief of service for SVAS, will begin teaching a new EMT-B and Refresher course at ambulance headquarters, which is across the road from The White Hart Inn. The course runs from Aug. 27, 2009, to March 25, 2010, meeting once a week on Thursday evenings for four hours. It is open to anyone in the community interested in becoming an EMT, including residents of all nearby towns in the Tri-state area.
In the past year, SVAS has responded to more than 450 calls. Nearly 30 percent of those calls involved residents of Noble Horizons. On average there are three or four motor vehicle crash calls a month, but falls and difficulty breathing cases account for the most frequently dispatched incidents.
As an all-volunteer service, squad members live in Salisbury/Lakeville and often find themselves assisting their friends or neighbors. Kaki Schafer-Reid, assistant chief of SVAS put it this way: “I’ve been on calls where I knew the people involved and someone will come up to me later and say, ‘It really helped me, seeing you.’ It calms people down, in stressful situations, to see a friendly face.�
Schafer-Reid has been a squad member for more than 10 years. She started as a driver but was encouraged to take the EMT class.
“I walked into the class and said to Jacquie (Rice), ‘I was told to take the class to see what everybody does while I’m driving. And I can’t handle blood.’ Jacquie laughed and said I should just participate [as much as I could].�
Schafer-Reid discovered after she successfully completed the training and was on the squad for a while that, “As you go on more calls, the training just takes over. Even when it’s really difficult, it brings you back around.
“And you feel good about yourself. There’s teamwork and camaraderie that kicks in and helps you through the bad things and afterward there are opportunities to talk about it. We all help each other get through.�
Using vans as ambulances
When Rees Harris started the Salisbury Volunteer Ambulance Service back in 1971, there were 14 members and the first ambulance was a converted Dodge van.
Over the years the equipment has become more sophisticated and customized. Michael Brenner, rescue chief (and longest-serving member, along with Rice, who joined when she was 18 years old) said, “Back then the vehicles were often Cadillacs and Pontiacs ; some squads had hearses that came from funeral homes.�
The dispatch system has changed as well.
“It used to be the call came into The White Hart and the operator there would call whichever EMT was on duty and then that person would go to the house of the other EMTs and beep the horn for them. Now we all have pagers and radios.�
A high turn-over rate
SVAS got its first modular ambulance in 1978. In the 38 years the squad has been serving the community, it’s had seven or eight ambulances. The average life of an ambulance is approximately 15 years, according to Brenner, which is longer than the average term of most volunteers.
Brenner estimates that there have been more than 1,000 people from the community who have served as EMTs or drivers in the history of the squad.
“The average stay time is five years,� he said. “Ten years is outstanding and at 15, it’s time to have a party.�
Brenner described the average volunteer as, well, not average.
“We get people from all walks of life here: business people, housewives, teachers, blue-collar workers, doctors and nurses. It takes a unique person to do what we do — but it also takes special families. The individuals give up their time and the families give up the individual. You can’t do it without a good support system.�
That makes squad members like Deb and Bob Fails most unusual. They joined the squad together, 13 years ago. Bob said, “We used to see Jared [Dr. Zelman, SVAS squad member and former head of the Sharon Hospital emergency room] a lot and he was always encouraging us to join. Then one day, we were at the Grove and our son went unconscious and we called for help. While we waited I was able to keep his airway open – but it was really scary and we (Deb and I) decided we needed to know more — and we decided to take the class. Our kids were little, 7, 9 and 11, so it was really tough.�
One requirement of the EMT class is to do 10 hours of training in the emergency room. Fails was drawn to the work and stayed on as a volunteer. It wasn’t long before they hired him and he embarked on a new career.
Schafer-Reid pointed out that has happened to a number of squad members; several EMTs work in the ER, some have gone on to nursing school, or become paramedics. She now works at Litchfield County Dispatch, the region’s 911 service. (This reporter is also an EMT-B, having joined SVAS four years ago.)
Currently, 42 licensed EMTs and eight drivers make-up the SVAS squad. New members are sought and needed.
The EMT-B and refresher course are good ways to learn about what the ambulance volunteers do. The classes are Thursdays from Aug. 27 to March 25, 6:30 to 10 p.m. The cost is $300 for the initial EMT-B certification. Call 860-435-9866 for information or to sign up.
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Telecom Reg’s Best Kept On the Books
When Connecticut land-use commissions update their regulations, it seems like a no-brainer to jettison old telecommunications regulations adopted decades ago during a short-lived period when municipalities had authority to regulate second generation (2G) transmissions prior to the Connecticut Siting Council (CSC) being ordered by a state court in 2000 to regulate all cell tower infrastructure as “functionally equivalent” services.
It is far better to update those regs instead, especially for macro-towers given new technologies like small cells. Even though only ‘advisory’ to the CSC, the preferences of towns by law must be taken into consideration in CSC decision making. Detailed telecom regs – not just a general wish list -- are evidence that a town has put considerable thought into where they prefer such infrastructure be sited without prohibiting service that many – though not all – citizens want and that first responders rely on for public safety.
Such regs come in handy when egregious tower sites are proposed in sensitive areas, typically on private land. The regs are a town’s first line of defense, especially when cross referenced to plans of conservation and development, P&Z regulations, and wetlands setbacks. They identify how/where the town plans to intersect with the CSC process. They are also a roadmap for service providers regarding preferred sites and sometimes less neighborhood contention. In fact, to have no telecom regs can weaken a town’s rights to protect environmental, scenic, and historic assets, and serve up whole neighborhoods to unnecessary overlapping coverage and corporate overreach. Such regs are unique to every town and should not follow anyone else’s boiler plate, especially industry’s.
Connecticut is the only state that has a centralized siting entity for cell towers. The good news is that applicants must prove need for new tower sites in an evidentiary proceeding and any decisions have the weight of the state behind them. The bad news is that the CSC used to be far less industry-friendly and rote in their reviews, which now resemble a check list. There is an operative assumption at CSC that if an applicant wants a tower, they must need it, otherwise why spend significant money to run the approval gauntlet? This reflects a subtle shift over the years at CSC from sincere willingness to protect the environment toward minimal tweaking of bad applications with minor changes. The bottom line is that towns really cannot rely on the CSC to do all the work for them.
What CSC issues telecom providers is a “certificate of environmental compatibility” after an evidentiary proceeding (not unlike a court case) with intervenors, parties, expert witnesses, and the service provider’s technical pro’s sworn in and subject to cross examination. Service providers get to do the same with any opposition from intervenor/party participants – like towns and citizens -- and their experts. It’s an impressive process whose ultimate goal is the fine balancing between allowing adequate/reliable public services and protecting state ecology with minimal damage to scenic, historic, and recreational values. They unfortunately often fall short of their mandate – like approving cell towers with diesel generators over town aquifers -- evidenced by CSC only rejecting about five cell towers in the past 15-20 years.
The CSC was founded in 1972 and clarified its mission in the 1980’s to prevent the state from being carved up willy-nilly by gas pipelines, high tension corridors, and broadcast towers. With the sudden proliferation of cell towers beginning in late 1990’s, it became the most sued agency in Connecticut by both an arrogant upstart industry if applications were denied and by towns/citizens when bad sites were forced on them. CSC gradually formed a defensive posture that drives their decisions toward industry with deeper pockets and attorneys on retainer.
For citizens, nothing can wreck one’s day like the CSC. It behooves towns to protect what little toolkit they have, and understand the legal parameters of the CSC’s playing field. The CSC is not a “normal” government agency where municipal/citizen redress is based on logic and local support. Their process is largely immune to everything but specific kinds of evidence – like town regs with setbacks/fall zones, radio frequency transmission signal strengths, sensitive areas identified, and detailed wildlife inventory, among others.
There is a current cell tower fight involving two intervening towns -- Washington and Warren; both with good cell tower regs – over a tower site within 1200’ of a Montessori School, near Steep Rock’s nature preserves with comprehensive geology/wildlife databases that include endangered, threatened and special concern flora and fauna, on established federal/state migratory bird flyways, within throwing distance to a historic site capable of being listed on the Underground Railroad, and with an access road on a blind curve entering a state highway that will permanently damage wetlands, vernal pools, and core forests. There are well credentialed environmental experts, including Dr. Michael Klemens, former chair of Salisbury’s P&Z, as well as the former director of migratory bird management at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and an RF engineer testifying to alternative approaches, plus three attorneys representing intervenors. It is the most professional challenge I have seen at CSC since Falls Village successfully mounted one that protected Robbins Swamps several years ago.
The hearing is ongoing, with uncertain results. To see what it takes today to stop an inappropriate tower siting, see Docket #543 under “Pending Matters” at https://portal.ct.gov/csc before removing local cell tower regs – the lowest hanging fruit that any town can possess in case it’s needed.
B, Blake Levitt is the Communications Director at The Berkshire-Litchfield Environmental Council. She writes about how technology affects biology.