sperryville fire training
Training at the Sperryville Volunteer Fire Department in March 2023.
• Among the proposals: More paid personnel, county support
• Supervisors must approve committee’s recommendations
Rappahannock County’s Public Safety Committee unanimously recommended a handful of initiatives Tuesday that committee chair and Hampton Supervisor Keir Whitson said are intended to “ease pressure” on volunteer emergency responders.
They range from making paid paramedics available to all county volunteer fire and rescue companies to providing rapid response vehicles to volunteers to take home to respond more quickly to emergencies, rather than driving to the station to pick one up.
Whitson, who introduced the proposals, said his goal was to “extend tangible assistance from county government to individual volunteer companies where there is a stated need.”
The Board of Supervisors would need to approve the measures.
It’s the latest step in the county’s efforts to support and better coordinate emergency services in the county — something that has become more critical as the group of voluntary responders gets smaller and grows older.
The initiatives would:
-
Enable the county to purchase Lifepaks, or patient monitors and defibrillators, for volunteer companies that can demonstrate a need for new ones. This, however, would likely require a change in the service agreement between the county and the fire and rescue operations because currently the county can cover only operational, and not capital costs of the volunteer companies.
-
Make available to all of the volunteer companies paramedics the county pays for to help them provide consistent coverage and fill gaps in their schedules.
-
Have the county play a more central role in the management of drugs and pharmaceuticals used by emergency responders.
-
Provide access to a Basic Life Support rapid response vehicle that a volunteer could take home so he or she could respond more quickly to a call without having to drive to the station to pick up a vehicle.
-
Set up a more centralized scheduling system overseen by the county.
An overall goal, Whitson noted, would be to lighten some of the administrative burden on the volunteers.
“I think it would be a disservice to these individual companies and our community if, from a Board of Supervisors perspective, we didn’t step up and provide this kind of support, especially when we’re sitting on a significant amount of taxpayer money that can be put to use,” he said.
“The hope is to affect real change in the system that keeps the volunteers we have from getting burned out. That’s where I’m coming from.”
But, as Whitson acknowledged, the challenge for the county is to play a larger role without appearing to threaten the independence of the voluntary fire and rescue companies. He pointed out that adoption by volunteer companies of any of the proposals, which he described as “modest but important,” would be voluntary.
Locating AEDs in county
Also at the meeting, Darren Stevens, the county’s Emergency Services Coordinator, reported on his efforts to determine where automated external defibrillators (AEDs) are located in the county.
It’s another project being driven by Whitson, who almost died of a heart attack two years ago while visiting his mother in Wisconsin. He has pointed out that it’s unlikely he would have survived the attack if it had occurred in Rappahannock.
Stevens said that so far he has located 37 AEDs in the county, 17 of which are in the sheriff department’s patrol cars. He identified 14 other places where they could be accessible, including outside all seven of the volunteer fire and rescue stations in the county, and at the new Food Pantry, the Scrabble Senior Center, the football field at the high school and the baseball field near the elementary school.
Whitson said private donors have expressed interest in helping to cover the cost of new AEDs.
