The Lake Eden retreat – with its acres of lulling hills, scenic lakes, rustic barns and cabins rising above the Swannanoa Valley – is usually the backdrop of summer camp memories, wedding nights or an annual music festival.
But on this July Saturday, almost 10 months after flood waters from Hurricane Helene all but washed the Swannanoa Valley away, a group of two dozen people surrounded an elderly man who was laid out under one of the property’s hundreds of shady trees.
He’s been injured. Probably fell out of the tree, one group member said. Maybe, another chimed in, heat stroke?
An authoritative voice spoke up:
“ Before you even get to your patient, what do you gotta do?,” he asked. Then answered: “Check to make sure that everything around is safe. That nothing's gonna harm me. He's lying in a field right here. This is your scene. He's laying on the ground. Here's what might have happened to him.”
Thomas McNally is an EMS supervisor with the Buncombe County Rescue Squad. He’s among the team leading the group through one of several emergency response demonstrations. The “injured” man on the ground was a member of the larger group, playing the role of an injured person.
The Rescue Squad started more than 60 years ago to supplement search and rescue operations in the county. They’ve since expanded to provide ambulance transportation, event medical support and other services to aid the county with their emergency response.
All the members of the rescue squad have to train and be certified like other first responders but the group is not an official county organization.
On this pristine summer Saturday, McNally is one of three members of the Rescue Squad guiding the group through a day of Civilian Emergency Response Team training, or CERT. It’s the first time the group has taught these skills to people outside their own organization.
The group attending the training is made up of retirees, warehouse employees and teachers. Most came from just down the mountain in Swannanoa, an area that saw some of the worst damage from the storm that killed more than 100 people throughout Western North Carolina last September. The sprawling community east of Asheville has been slow to recover after the Swannanoa River rose to 27 feet and swept away hundreds of roads and bridges along with homes and businesses.
The storm also damaged the North Fork Water Treatment Facility, a few miles from the Lake Eden property.
In the wake of the storm, as government services were slow to enter the neighborhood, community volunteer groups served as lifelines for residents, setting up care stations for food, water and medical supplies as well as updates on recovery.
CERT Training
The Saturday training was a first for the Rescue Squad, Chief Nathan Smith told BPR News. The group gathered after the storm to discuss how they could better prepare their communities for another emergency. The group turned its attention to helping people learn basic survival skills.
“There's oftentimes going to be a delay. Sometimes it's days, sometimes it's weeks, between the occurrence and how long it might take for official resources to arrive,” Smith said.
The Rescue Squad had a CERT trainer on staff and decided to teach the course, Smith said, because “it focuses on skills that are common for emergency responders, but not so common for everyday citizens. It's trying to bridge that gap so that citizens can be better prepared to take some of those first steps that emergency responders would be taking.”
Ronald Ramsey, a member of the rescue squad, led the group through the training. CERT training, he said, helps both first responders and residents.
“Our main goal is to put those skills in individuals’ hands primarily for their immediate household, and then for their neighbors,” he said. “Because when we build and create these resilient pockets, it's resources that aren't necessarily needed that can be diverted to folks in greater need.”
The concept of CERT training began in Los Angeles 40 years ago by their fire department which responded to several area-wide threats from major disasters in California. The program was made available for the entire country in 1993, and now CERT programs are available in all 50 states – each unique to its community.
The program trains volunteers in basic disaster response skills, such as fire safety, search and rescue, team organization and disaster medical operations.
Tourniquets, gauze and fire extinguishers
After spending the morning in a barn house-turned-classroom the group of CERT trainees made their way outside onto a grassy slope for hands-on demonstrations. First up, medical evaluations of injured people.
Siler Sloan, one of the youngest in the group at 26, was up first.
Siler Sloan is a member of the Swannanoa Grassroots Alliance, a coalition of residents, neighborhood groups, nonprofits, churches, and businesses that work to support relief, recovery and rebuilding efforts.
Standing above the elderly man splayed out under the tree, Sloan asks him about his collarbones.
“ Alright. I'm gonna start with your collarbone. Any pain here?”
Sloan went along the man’s body, pressing his hands against ribs, hips and feet – routinely checking for hypothetical blood as he was taught that morning – until he had given the man a thorough inspection.
“ The worst thing we can do is start at the head and work our way down, and we get down to his feet and we pull our hands out and they're wet [with blood],” Ramsey told the group before the demonstration.
The rest of the group followed Sloan, one by one, lying on the grass to simulate an injured person, while another member of the group worked their hands along their body to try and find the source of pain.
“This is not going to be an isolated event,” Sloan told BPR News, speaking about the storm. “We need to be prepared for other similar events …The better everyday citizens and members of the community are prepared for these disaster scenarios – and at least have some awareness of how to respond – the better prepared and more resilient the community will be.”
After the injury demonstration, the group gathered in a half-circle to watch Ramsey demonstrate how to apply a tourniquet to an open wound. He used a pool noodle that had been slit open vertically, not an actual limb.
As attendees paired up to practice, Ramsey unpacked his emergency supply bag. Inside: gauze, medical wraps, a sawed-off boat oar and old t-shirts – all of which could be used to rig makeshift slings, control bleeding and minimize pain.
The pool noodles made the experience palatable for Marianne Rogers, a 62-year-old Swannanoa resident who attended the training.
“ I have a specific skillset and a comfort level that probably won't include gushing wounds. But, it was good to see the demonstration and understand how devastating things can be and have some sense of what to do,” she said.
Rogers was one of several volunteers who turned Swannanoa’s Grovemont Park into a community supply hub in the wake of the storm.
Despite her squeamishness towards open wounds, she said she came to the training to be more able to help her community in the event of another disaster.
“ I really want to be more prepared to take care of my neighbors and to just be more capable as we go forward,” she said. “ It isn't about liking them, it's about helping one another. So even if it's just like once a quarter, once a month, make an effort to speak to people in your neighborhood.”
