Secure status lifted at Riverdale High School following incident<\/a><\/p>\n35 fire and rescue workers were deployed from departments across Southwest Florida, including Bonita Springs Fire and Rescue and Estero Fire Rescue.<\/p>\n
Crews brought food and water to sustain themselves along with large equipment like chainsaws.<\/p>\n
Before the storm made landfall, it shifted, and so did the crew’s response.<\/p>\n
Task Force 6 leader Terry Brunson said the team did not end up performing any water rescues.<\/p>\n
“Luckily there wasn’t as much water as anticipated, so no water rescues performed by our team. Most of our missions and stuff included large trees on homes, cars, roadway stuff and things like of that nature,” Brunson said.<\/p>\n
Instead, most of the work focused on clearing downed trees and debris that made roads impassable.<\/p>\n
“A lot of the roads were impassable. When we sent out our recon team, they took chainsaws with them to try to clear some access for vehicles to get around and things of that nature. Once they encounter, we had a lot of big oak trees that went down and stuff like that. We were called back to the division and they would send especially cut team to come and clear that road,” Brunson said.<\/p>\n
Brunson said compared to past deployments, this response effort was less demanding, but every disaster is still a learning opportunity for crews.<\/p>\n
“With the motivation of these guys, not that we wish bad things on people, but they kind of want to use their skills,” Brunson said.<\/p>\n
Greg DeWitt, fire chief of Bonita Springs Fire and Rescue, said those skills carry back home too.<\/p>\n
“Not only do you learn it at USAR and we have to be proficient in it year in and year out, but for all the departments, they bring it back to their own departments,” DeWitt said.<\/p>\n
Brunson also pointed out that not every community has the same resources to handle a disaster on their own.<\/p>\n
“There’s a lot of places that don’t have the resources to help them. We have counties in Florida that have a lot of resources and we have counties that have no resources. So that mutual agreement itself lets us go and help them,” Brunson said.<\/p>\n
Even with the crews back home, Brunson said the work does not stop.<\/p>\n
“Came home this morning and now we’re preparing everything to do it again,” Brunson said.<\/p>\n
He added that crews will keep training so they are ready when the next community needs them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LEE COUNTY, Fla. \u2014 First responders from Southwest Florida are back home after spending four days helping communities…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":426396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210,167674,167670,28,575,167673,166170,167672,994,356,1521,25149,167675,167671],"class_list":["post-426395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news","tag-chief-of-bonita-springs-fire","tag-disaster-management","tag-florida","tag-food","tag-greg-dewitt","tag-isaias","tag-large-equipment","tag-leader","tag-lee-county","tag-southwest-florida","tag-task-force","tag-task-force-6","tag-terry-brunson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=426395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/426396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}