ORLANDO, Fla. —
It takes a lot of manpower to recover after a hurricane. That’s why Central Florida’s finest answered the call when Hurricane Isaias slammed the Florida Panhandle last week.
First responders from across the state were there, such as those within Florida Urban Search & Rescue Task Force 4.
WESH 2 News caught up with a few members of the task force during a live interview on Thursday to ask about their mission.
“Task Force 4 is an urban search and rescue team based out of Central Florida. It’s made up of Orange County Fire Rescue, Seminole County Fire, and the City of Orlando Fire Department, and we each bring in members of our department to build that team out, one of the eight teams in the state of Florida,” said Firefighter Ed Haynes of the Orlando Fire Department. “(…) I think our first real one in 20 years was Hurricane Harvey, and each time we’ve just built on it and better prepared the team for those future deployments.”
“It’s one of the best things we have on our team is we come together from all our individual agencies but we work together to kind of support the other agencies that we’re there to help and then, in turn, we come back and can bring those skills and experiences back to the local agencies that we respond to daily,” said Battalion Chief Matt Jaynes of the Seminole County Fire Department.
Lt. Brandon Allen of Orange County Fire Rescue said that his team was swift-water specific and was pre-deployed to Milton because the area has a history of flooding in hurricanes.
“Once the storm passed, we got out in the field, started assessing the damage. While there wasn’t really any flooding, the wind damage was very extensive to the point where it’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” Allen said. “Just down the street from where we were staying, an entire roof got ripped off of an apartment complex. The high school next to us, their scoreboard, we found it in the neighborhood next door. I mean, trees ripped in half, it was pretty extensive, so we basically assisted the local fire department down there, damage assessments and just making sure that, if anybody needed help cleaning roads, that we were there to assist in whatever they needed.”
Watch the full interview at the top of this story.