Nov 26, 2012
Someone can have the ability to make command decisions that steer an organization whether it be large or small but that person is not a leader until they find someone who is willing to follow them. In the last year and a half, I have written about a few of the incidents that I have been part of, mainly the tornado that hit Springfield on June 1 and the ice storm that we had last year around Halloween. Just the other day though, I added another one to my list. In the downtown area of my city, we had what started out as a simple gas leak. That all changed when four miles away, sitting in our office, I heard a loud bang. The building with the leak exploded with two of my crews only a short distance away. Thankfully, they were okay, but we were called to action to organize and take care of close to twenty people who were injured. Everyone involved is still counting our blessings that no one was killed. In moments, the people that I had in the streets started to mobilize. Crews cleared the hospital. People in their homes, not 100% sure what had just occurred started to put their uniforms on and head to work. I took the new supervisor I was training to take my spot and started a ride that felt like it took an eternity down to the scene. It took about twenty minutes to get organized, get a staging area setup, and to really start getting a grasp on what we were dealing with but once we did, we were ready for whatever would be thrown at us. The response from the EMS community was amazing. At peek, we had more than twenty ambulances in our staging area ready to do whatever it took to make sure every patient got out of there. The unsung heroes though were the fifteen people who showed up at the office who were not even scheduled to be in that day ready to jump on ambulances and go wherever they were needed. With all of the trucks that we had assigned to the explosion, we were able...