Spirit Summer 2020 Edition 9
FIRST RESPONDERS PROTECT & SERVE
“If a call comes in on as a respiratory distress (case), we bump it up to an N95 mask along with a set of disposable coveralls and a face (shield) if possible.”
BY TIM JOHNSON tim.johnson@nptelegraph.com
Law enforcement officers, firefighters and EMTs face stress daily under normal conditions. Add to that the concerns of protecting themselves from the highly contagious coronavirus while working to keep the public safe as well.
Law enforcement agencies are taking similar precautions.
“(PPE) has always been issued to troopers in terms of gloves and hand sanitizers along with disinfective agents for the vehicles,” said Tyler Schmidt, captain of the Nebraska State Patrol’s Troop D. “Just because
“The biggest thing for us (with stress) is just the unknown,” said Jeff Hankla, a battalion chief with 20 years’ experience in the North Platte Fire Department. “There has been SARS, the bird flu and the swine flu (in the past), but this is something completely different. “We are going to learn from (the pandemic), a lot of people are. Hopefully we will get better for the future, not that I hope it ever happens again.” Hankla said three members of the department came off a 14-day
(COVID-19) is here doesn’t mean that we haven’t had to address infectious organisms before.
“We have always had a need to clean the vehicles and make sure equipment is sanitized. The volume of gloves and masks (being issued for calls) has increased.” Schmidt said daily team huddles among troopers and their supervisors have changed. Those were normally done face-to-face, but now Zoom meetings have become standard.
quarantine April 10 after responding to an earlier call for assistance for a person who was exhibiting symptoms of the disease. No other members of the department have been quarantined since then, according to Fire Chief Dennis Thompson. He added that the pandemic led to an increase in safety measures. “We thought we were pretty well-prepared in terms of our personal protective equipment because of our day-to-day services,” Thompson said. “We came to find out we needed extra (protection) and it made us look at how we stock supplies in preparing for something like this. “We prepare every day and train for reponses for those things that are out of the ordinary,” Thompson said, but a situation like the pandemic “is something that you can’t really prepare for. You just don’t know the scope of it or how big it is going to get. “I think we have learned that even with all the training, that we still have to be willing to look outside of that box.” Those safety steps include additional personal protective equipment and increased disinfection of vehicles used on emergency calls. “On top of the regular glove and eye protection that we wore on a day-to-day basis before this all happened (on health emergency calls), we are wearing at a minimum a surgical mask,” Hankla said.
The North Platte Police Department also took steps to limit potential community spread of the
coronavirus within the department. The daily morning roll call has been suspended, and all patrol shifts were compartmentalized into six 12-hour stints each week. “We continue to reassess that ... but as of right now we are going to keep this in place,” Police Chief Daniel Hudson said. “We realize that we can’t do this forever — with just the exhaustion and wear- and-tear on the officers.” Hudson said the department has followed precautionary safety steps and still had a number of officers and support staff tested for the virus. All the tests came back negative. Officers were issued cloth masks, and the patrol vehicles are sanitized at shift changes by both the outgoing and incoming officers. The back of a vehicle is also sanitized after an individual is transported to the Lincoln County Detention Center. The outgoing and incoming officers do not have face-to-face contact with each other. “Should someone be sick or asymptomatic, we don’t want to contaminate one shift,” Deputy Chief Steve Reeves said. “We have been pretty regimented on that.”
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