South Hills team honored as state Rescue Service of the Year
Say you rent digging equipment for what appears to be a simple job on a French drain. Suddenly, the walls collapse and trap you within a considerable amount of dirt.
When that scenario played out for a Baldwin Borough man a few years ago, the SHACOG Technical Rescue Team was there to make sure he got out of his predicament alive.
The team, with emergency personnel from the South Hills Area Council of Government’s 22 municipalities, is called out only about seven times a year. But it has a crucial mission in addressing low-frequency, high-risk situations that fire departments usually are not trained to handle.
“That’s when people usually get hurt the most,” Ed Davies, the team’s chief, said.
Davies, a lieutenant with Mt. Lebanon Fire Department, was instrumental in founding the team in 2008. It has been recognized in 2015 as Pennsylvania Rescue Service of the Year by the state Department of Health and state Emergency Health Services Council. The team will be presented with the award at a dinner on Nov. 21 in Harrisburg.
The team has 60-plus members from 32 fire departments and nine emergency medical services operations in the SHACOG area, with about an equal number of firefighters and paramedics or emergency medical technicians.
Shortly after Davies joined the Mt. Lebanon department 10 years ago, he started formulating plans to combine the resources of numerous agencies to address more complex rescue efforts.
“Instead of each small department trying to train people,” he explained as the rationale, “we’ll take care of the stuff that doesn’t happen every day.”
Mt. Lebanon Chief Nick Sohyda took the idea to his colleagues in SHACOG’s Fire Chiefs Advisory Committee, which decided to give it a go.
The committee oversees the technical rescue team and provides it with an annual budget of $10,000, from dues paid by participating municipalities. The money goes toward items such as training and personal protection equipment.
As far as training, sessions take place at least once a month, with a recent emphasis on responding to confined-space emergencies. Other incidents to which the team responds might involve building collapses, tower rescues, industrial machinery extraction and, most frequently, water-related situations such as flooding.
Training meets Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards, Davies said, and team members take National Professional Qualifying Board testing every two years for accreditation using the National Fire Protection Association’s professional qualifying standards.
A U.S. Air Force veteran, Davies is a career rescue practitioner, having previously worked in Monroeville and as rescue supervisor for Ross-West View Emergency Medical Services Authority.