Deputy Fire Chief Mark Hemeyer with Monroe County Fire Rescue joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM yesterday morning to talk about what’s going on in the county.
Trauma Star had some new aircraft arrive recently.
Hemeyer said, “We’ve been working really, really hard around the clock to get those up and running, get those in service. It’s a big job. It’s a big task. Hats off to the everybody involved, the pilots, the med crews. Thank you to Sheriff Ramsay for his part in it. As we know, it’s a partnership with Monroe County Fire Rescue and the Sheriff’s Department. So yesterday, I had the pleasure to actually go for a ride on Trauma Star on one of the new helicopters with the sheriff, and get to see the aircraft perform in person. It was a pretty neat experience, pretty eye opening to how far we’ve come. We were able to have a conversation with the sheriff on the helicopter, and we get to reminisce a little bit about how far we’ve come in the program, and how blessed we are to have this program. Nowhere else really has this program to be able to shuttle people out of the Keys, as quickly as we can. It’s just an amazing thing.”
Did the government shut down affect MCFR?
Hemeyer said it “kind of slowed down the process, as far as getting the check rides completed and getting the certifications for the pilots moving forward, but we’re back up and running now, and we’re getting a hard date of January 2, where we get the first helicopter in service, and up and going, and then hopefully a few weeks after that, we could have the second one going, and we’ll have three in total. The third is a backup, so that’ll be a big deal. But we’ve still got a long way to go with the training. We’ve got a couple weeks of training coming up here with the helicopters. Once they get completed with the FAA, they’re going to be taken and the helicopters will be going out and doing training, training with the extra crews, because there’s going to be a different system with these helicopters. It’s not going to be the same as the old ones, so we need to get everybody on board and everybody checked off with that, including the other fire departments, our neighbor fire departments, and their crews. One of the biggest things is we’ll be doing what’s called a hot load on the helicopter. We’re not going to be shutting the helicopter down when we receive a patient. The blades will be spinning and be going, so we’re going to be doing a lot of training with that, and going over how to approach a helicopter, and how to load the patients on the helicopter. So a lot a lot of safety stuff, but really excited to get that going. It’s been a long road, and really we’ve just got to give thanks to everybody that’s involved. It’s been a lot of hard work.”
There was also training with the fire academy recently.
Hemeyer said, “Training Division, I really want to give them a thank you. They’ve been working hard. We have the Monroe County Fire Academy, where they get certified to become firefighters, and eventually they can throw their hat in the ring to seek employment, whether with us or another fire department. So we’re about a month away from them graduating in that class, and we’re always really proud of that. It’s a great program. It’s great for the individuals involved. We started off with a bigger class than before. We’ve upped the number of students, and we had a hard cap at 35. We ended up starting with 33 and I think we’re down to 31 right now. The class is just moving along, doing well, really, really proud of our instructors out there. We have our off duty firefighters we use as well to instruct and teach the classes, so really looking forward to getting through with that, and looking forward to the graduation. We’ll be having final testing for the fire students will be first week of January, and then a couple weeks later, we’ll be looking to do a graduation for them. That’s usually a really big turnout, a really positive turnout for both the students and the families. So lot of hard work, lot of hard days for them out there. Luckily for them, the weather’s cooling off a little bit for them, but starts off hot, and then starts to cool off now this time of year, and they get a little bit of a break.”
Another fire academy will begin in April.
Hemeyer said, “It’s mid April is going to be our next fire academy, and then we’re going to try to push on to a third one coming around October, November. These individuals will be able to roll out into EMT program that we’ve been working with Marathon and another private entity, Resource One, working with our neighbors, working really hard with them. It’s been a good deal. So they’ll be able to come right out of the academy and go into EMT school, and that’ll give them their tickets and their minimums to look for employment either with us or with another fire department. But we really like to keep them here. Since we train them here, we want to keep our people.
Safety during the holidays is very important.
Hemeyer said, “Safety is number one. We want everybody to have a very good holiday with no accidents. Obviously, we just had our time change. So that’s the time when we want to change the batteries in our fire smoke detectors. Want to check them and test them out. If you haven’t done it already, go ahead and just change out those batteries and give them a test and make sure they’re working. Heading into the cooler months, we start seeing people using more and more things like space heaters. So make sure that we practice that safely, make sure we have plenty of space around it, and make sure we’re we’re paying attention to just our normal practices in the house. We’ve got Thanksgiving, which is when we start breaking out the turkey fryers. Fortunately, we seem to do really, really well down here in the Florida Keys with that and almost 20 years of my service, I’ve never seen any really bad incidents to speak of. But it but it doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. So make sure that we have those turkey fryers out in an open area. We don’t want to set it up on our wood deck or anything that could catch fire. We want to make sure a bird is completely thawed out, and we want to make sure that we have help putting the bird in the oil, and do it slowly, and take our precautions, have fire extinguishers ready, and make sure we’re doing it safely and follow all the safe practices. One of the biggest safety tips that I can say for the holidays is the highways. Highways are going to be filling up. This is that time of year when we start getting a lot of people, a lot of visitors coming down, a lot of impatient drivers. So that’s our biggest uptick during the holidays, is just incidents on the road. So tell the local people, just remember that we’ve got a lot of visitors. They’re not really used to our roads and our driving patterns are a little bit different from where they’ve come from and people can get impatient. So I tell everybody out there to just be very vigilant. Have their head on a swivel. Just take your time and be patient. You’re already here and getting out and passing and doing some of the stuff that causes this stuff, it’s not going to get you there any faster. I want to make sure that we just practice safety on the roads.”
For more information on Monroe County Fire Rescue, click here: https://www.monroecounty-fl.gov/firerescue