Northwest Arkansas emergency responders have returned home from Texas flood areas, some are preparing to go to Florida while others continue fighting wildfires in the West.
Arkansas Task Force One, comprised of members from here and central Arkansas specially trained in urban search and rescue, sent a team last week to Beaumont, Texas.
AGFC Wildlife Officers Assist and Rescue pic.twitter.com/zvIihJUmFg
— AR Game and Fish (@ARGameandFish) September 1, 2017
Members focused on their next mission as soon as they left the flooded neighborhoods in Texas a couple days ago, said John Luther, director of Washington County Emergency Management and the task force’s team coordinator.
“On the way home, we had conversations about how to better respond in the future, which could be this week,” Luther said. “Those could be our communities. When we are not the ones affected, we do what we can to help the people who are. It’s nonstop, but that’s what we do.”
They hadn’t gotten the green light to go to Florida as of Thursday afternoon, but Florida officials asked the Task Force on Wednesday to consider the kind of response they could provide if needed.
On the other coast, the leader of the Benton County Search and Rescue team and others from the area are helping fight the wildfires.
Flooding in the South, Southeast
The call for help in Texas came late the night of Sept. 28 and by 7 a.m. the next day 18 members of the Northwest Arkansas Task Force were ready to assist in flood relief. They came from Rogers, Springdale and Fayetteville fire departments along with Washington County Emergency Management. The crew met up with 19 members from the central Arkansas task force.
The swift assembly and response is an indicator of the training Arkansas Task Force One has done for nearly a decade, Luther said. It was formed to prepare for terrorist incidents or natural disasters, such as a large earthquake on the New Madrid fault, he said.
“With some things it doesn’t matter what you’re training for, you can use many of the skills for other emergencies,” Luther said.
The task force met up with 28 officers and others from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission on the road in Texas.
The team got their orders on dry land in San Antonio before heading to Lumberton and Beaumont only to be unable to find a route in. They ended up in Kountze, a small town about 10 miles northwest of Lumberton.
The team set up headquarters at Koiuntze’s intermediate school gymnasium, from which they ran rescue and transportation missions.
“They had to fight to get into where they needed to go. You put boats in because the road is flooded and then there’s a patch of dry land where boats can’t go,” said Andy Traffanstedt, director of Pulaski County Emergency Management, who stayed in Arkansas to hold down the fort for both areas of the state.
Luther said those who remained in Arkansas were just as critical to the mission by providing research and keeping watch over their home towns.
“We were getting a lot of support from our folks at home, which makes our job easier and more effective,” he said. “We don’t take everybody in our unit, because we realize we have obligations at home.”
Crews got out on water that covered the highway and rose so high they were nearly level with street lights. Most of the critical rescues had been completed, yet many were stranded in homes or small neighborhoods in dry areas, unable to get food or water.
They delivered basic supplies to families and feed and bales of hay for their animals, all of whom were trapped at a county livestock fair, Luther said.
The team helped get all civilian boaters out of the water to allow for safe restoration of power to the town.
In all, the team completed 44 rescues and worked four 20-hour days, said Lt. Brian Aston with Game and Fish who co-coordinated the efforts with Luther. Smaller teams boated to Lumberton and as far as Port Arthur to lend a hand.
“It was a humanitarian effort. No task was too small,” said Aston. “The responders there were stressed. They were tapped out. Everybody was very grateful for us. We always want to leave a very small footprint. We don’t want to tap the resources, but locals showed up with food and teachers let us stay in their classrooms. It was amazing.”
The team ran into other emergency responders from Northwest Arkansas who have gone with smaller task forces to assist.
Some of the task force responders wished they had been asked to go earlier, which would have allowed them to get there before flooding hit.
Capt. Clint Bowen of the Rogers Fire Department said he was grateful to be selected to go with the task force and everyone worked well together, but he left feeling like more could have been done.
“It’s a very devastating thing that Texas had to go through, and we should have been deployed two days earlier,” Bowen said. “Now, I have no doubt we did good getting down there, but we want to get there when it’s fixing to get bad and be there when it does get bad.”
Luther said the calls officials have to make in these situations are difficult because the information available changes quickly, and hindsight is always 20-20.
The Task Force will take lessons learned to Florida and the crews will be ready.
“We may send a few people who went to Texas because what they learned will help the team, but it will mostly be a different strike team so they will be well rested,” Traffanstedt said.
Fire in the Northwest
On the other side of the country, nearly 1.5 million acres across nine states are burning and 24,000 firefighters work to control the flames.
The Chetco Bar Fire in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness in Oregon is the second largest active wildfire and burned 176,770 acres as of Wednesday afternoon, according the National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s incident system. It has been burning since July 12.
Arkansans are among the 1,600 firefighters from 43 states working to control Chetco’s flames. With the group is Terry Krasko, a public service officer with the Ozark-St. Francis National Forest, U.S. Forest Service.
“A lot of people have asked me why are we here. That’s just how we do it. We’re all Americans and we work together,” he said.
Krasko is based in Russellville. Resources and manpower are stretched thin, he said. More than 80 wildfires rage from Southern California to Montana.
“We are going to have large fire activity far into this month to mid-October,” he said. “In this part of Oregon, we’ve been 85 days without rain. Overall, it’s a big situation. We share the resources across whatever we’ve got.”
Many people reach out asking how they can help the firefighters, Krasko said, but they need to consider the thousands who have fled.
“The firefighters themselves are being taken care of, but it’s the people being evacuated that are in trouble,” Krasko said. “If people are concerned and want to do good things, we have a lot of relief agencies helping people, like the Red Cross.”
James Mason, leader of Benton County Search and Rescue, arrived last week to work with personnel at the Chetco Fire as a training specialist. Mason said resources are getting stressed and he’s proud to have a lot of representation from the Natural State.
“All the news coverage went to Hurricane Harvey when it hit, and now we are waiting on Irma to hit and that will get the coverage while the fires still burn on,” Mason said.
National Guard
The Arkansas National Guard has about 1,500 people — including several Northwest Arkansas policemen — on the ground and in the air over Texas flood areas. The guard is discussing the possibility of going to Florida, said spokesman Maj. William Phillips, but will have to wait for an official request from Florida and the governor’s orders. “We are able to stay as long as we’re needed,” Phillips said. “We’ve been very responsive to our neighbors needs.”
Source: Staff report
Ashton Eley can be reached by email at aeley@nwadg.com or Twitter @NWAAshton.