Editor’s Note: RJ Sangosti is a Denver Post photojournalist who was embedded with the Lakewood-based Colorado Task Force 1 as it conducted rescue operations in North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Florence.
PEMBROKE, N.C. — While walking door-to-door to make sure residents were evacuated along the swollen Lumber River, paramedic Fred Salazar of the Colorado Springs Fire Department talked about his job back home.
He recently went out on a call involving a 12-year-old boy, who Salazar’s family knew, who drowned in a swimming pool.
“It makes you feel guilty when you can’t save a child,” Salazar said. “Here I see a lot of people helping a lot of people… and that makes me feel not as guilty.”
Salazar is part of Colorado Task Force 1, an urban search-and-rescue team based in Lakewood that is one of more than two dozen such units that operate under the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Colorado group includes veterans who, like team safety manager John Bolger, deployed to New Orleans in the devastating aftermath of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.
Colorado Task Force 1 deployed to Robeson County in North Carolina as Hurricane Florence worked its way toward land. Its members still aren’t sure when they will be able to return home.
After the hurricane made landfall Sept. 14 and eventually was downgraded to a tropical storm, the residents of Robeson County still felt its temper. It rained for days, there were tornado warnings and rivers overflowed their banks, isolating entire communities.
“It is not if it’s going to flood, it is when,” Steve Aseltine, the task force’s leader, said during a morning briefing before the storm affected the area surrounding Pembroke.
The first few days were all about logistics and setting up base camp at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Cots for the 45-member team were neatly arranged along a gym floor. Boxes on top of boxes of gear were labeled, stored and made ready for action. Then the waiting began. The team conducted drills, went over scenarios and talked water and boat safety, checking and rechecking gear before the hurricane made its way inland.
It was the night of Sept. 15 when the action got real. Several members of the squad who are trained for swift-water rescue worked throughout the night evacuating 123 people from rising floodwaters.
But not all of the jobs on the team are the type that get rescuers’ photos on the front page of the newspaper. Some work is behind the scenes.
Nick Grosch, for example, a fire captain with South Metro Fire Rescue in Englewood, is the team’s logistics manager, charged with making sure everything at the base of operation runs smoothly. One of his many jobs is to make sure there is food for the crew. There were a couple of days where peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast were followed by white bread with ham and cheese for lunch — and again for dinner.
“The guys really don’t know how good we have it,” Grosch said.
It’s that perspective that keeps people going in situations like this. It’s OK to celebrate the little things during a hurricane — like the success of filling your tank with gas after waiting almost two hours in line at a Shell station in Laurinburg, NC. You never know when the road back home may be flooded and closed.
“We can’t let our guard down for a second,” Aseltine told his team in that same early morning briefing. Hurricane Florence was like that — when you thought the fight was done, it punched again.
The men and women who comprise Colorado Task Force 1 are firefighters, paramedics, doctors, engineers and K-9 handlers. They have hard jobs back home in Colorado, and yet they signed up to do that work in even harder conditions in post-Florence North Carolina.
