It was a busy weekend for first responders as a severe winter snow storm descended on Charlottesville.
The Charlottesville-Albemarle Rescue Squad, a volunteer group that answers to 911 health and rescue calls, responded to 33 calls in the 48 hours starting on Saturday, said Squad Chief Daniel Paxton. A regular 12-hour shift typically sees only three to four calls, making this weekend exceptionally busy.
Instead of the regular 6 people per 12 hour shift, the rescue squad had 23 people, most of whom are volunteers, to come and stay at the station throughout the weekend. Some volunteers, including Paxton, worked full 48-hour shifts.
“It was crazy,” said Paxton on Monday, Jan. 26. “There are some people I hardly saw throughout the day, because we were on opposite calls. It was very, very busy.”
Road access posed the biggest challenge, forcing the squad to perform complex extractions.
“The unique part has been the access issues. We’ve had to use our stokes baskets like a sled to drag people out of their house to an ambulance.”
In one case they had to move a patient more than 1,000 feet from their home to the ambulance. In another case, they had to park the ambulance 1,500 feet away and use a stokes basket, a stretcher designed for rescue in difficult terrain, to move the patient.
Crews also had to tow their ambulances on four separate occasions after they became stuck in the snow.
The calls covered a wide range of emergencies, from a woman in labor to cold exposure and snow-related injuries.
According to Dr. William Brady, a UVA Health emergency medicine physician, yesterday was relatively slow in the emergency department. It’s common, he said, for people to stay home during such weather events and wait to seek care. As roads reopen, he expects volume to increase.
“We did see some falls related to ice and snow. We saw some sledding accidents, some skiing accidents and certainly some motor vehicle accidents,” said Brady.
“Today is another matter. As the world begins to open back up again. We’re seeing more people, and that’ll likely be the case even more so tomorrow when the roads are increasingly better. In that setting, we see a lot of people that have experienced slip and fall on the ice and they come in with hip pain or wrist pain, arm pain, or they hit their head and they have a bad headache.”
He said he wasn’t aware of any local cases of hypothermia or carbon monoxide exposure, though such cases were on the rise due to the storm in Central Virginia, according to a press release Sunday from Gov. Abigail Spanberger.
The Charlottesville Fire Department, which also increased staffing in preparation for the winter storm, did not respond to Charlottesville Tomorrow in time for this publication.
Brady, however, said he assisted the fire department’s EMS yesterday and said he was grateful for how fire, rescue and law enforcement personnel coordinated.
“We worked very closely with them and they’re quite literally the front line, trying to make their way through streets that haven’t been plowed and very slippery hills.”
Brady advised everyone to continue to be cautious this week and be particularly aware of ice and black ice, which is a thin, transparent layer on the roads. He recommended that those who can, stay home.
