(To Be Heard Right Before Lunch) Presentation - Pasco County Fire Rescue Special Operations Equipment Demonstration - No Funding Required

1:33:36That's it. Okay. Thank you. Uh now we're ready for resolution 46. Chief Casey.

1:33:50Sorry you threw me off by resolution. Uh thank you, Mr uh Chairman Mariano. Uh Scott Cassim, Fire Chief Pasco Fire Rescue. So we were really planning on doing this presentation, which should only take a couple minutes. Uh we were gonna do this a year ago, but uh because of the pandemic we've had to shift forward. The reason we wanted to do it a year ago, because it would have been the five year anniversary of starting the program. For those of you that recall five years ago or now six years ago now We came to uh in front of the board to ask for some money in cooperation with our

1:34:20utilities department actually to make a purchase. for what we now call our squad one, which is our special operations unit. And it was the very first part of our special operations program. And for those of you that don't know, special operations is kind of a a subset of emergencies that's outside the normal, I should say normal, but for us it's normal, uh medical calls and fires. So those are the things like water rescues, trench collapses, uh hazardous materials, heavy vehicle extrication, things of those nature.

1:34:51Things that we call low frequency, I mean they don't happen very often, but they're very, very high risk. There's a lot of risk for things to go bad and for people to get hurt. So we wanted to establish a program six years ago that would be a group of individuals that are specially trained with the r required um equipment that they would need in order to to mitigate those type of emergencies. So the very first uh piece of equipment was the squad, which was a a heavy rescue unit. You

1:35:21can see that's the original group of uh firefighters that participated in the initial training to get uh brought up to speed. We were able to fill that vehicle up with all the equipment that we needed. at the time and that truck is still in service. We've been using it the last six years. that actual vehicle was uh so uh well designed that the manufacturer wanted to use that design over and over again, so they actually asked if they could take that vehicle to a an international trade show in Indianapolis, Indiana. and they did that before we actually took delivery. So

1:35:51it was shown on the international stage to firefighters all across the world and they actually did end up selling quite a few uh vehicles after that. Um I don't have the remote, really just uh next slide, thank you.

1:36:05Oh, sorry. You have to keep hitting next slide till we get to the next slide. So I kinda talked over this one. There we go. Just keep hitting it. So the program has grown considerably uh over the six years since we started with that first truck and that first group of people. We've also added our truck one and truck one is a ladder truck, but and I know you've all seen it. It's a little bit different in the fact that it has a bucket at the end. And that bucket at the end of that particular ladder truck, which is a hundred feet in in height or can reach a hundred feet in height. That

1:36:35uh now allows us to have multiple responders working at height versus a straight ladder truck and only you only have one responder up there. So that was a huge asset and and and part of our special operations program. The uh urban search and rescue program was added. uh several years ago and accompanying that is our drone program. I think I'm not sure if we're gonna have some drones out there or not, but if uh hopefully we do. The water rescue program, we do have a way to now deploy some smaller boats. We do have a quick deploy boat that's

1:37:06on the on the the heavy rescue unit that you saw. Maybe we'll have that out there today. And then all along we've been putting a lot of people through training. So uh there's a lot of technical uh aspects to this particular program. So we've been putting all of our firefighters that are interested through those different uh training courses. So we've we've come a long way. Another big uh asset that we've added is our MERV buses. So major emergency response vehicles, fancy name for

1:37:36these MERV buses. And I know uh you all probably remember the lightning bolt that struck Bayonet Point Hospital back in 2016 just as Hurricane Hermeen was coming across uh our shores here in Pasco County. That uh lightning strike uh required the fire department to evacuate all two hundred and twenty-five patients that were in that hospital that night out. And we did that in seven hours, but And everybody ev everybody got to a safe place. However, we realized that we had a

1:38:06shortfall. We didn't have a really good way to transport mass numbers of people all at once. So we we had to do it the traditional way where you literally put one person in an ambulance at a time and start moving. So when you start doing the math, two hundred twenty five patients, that's gonna take a long time. Well, there were uh we did call ambulances from all over Florida and as far away as Alachua County and Orlando. But we were able to get a couple of buses that that came out of uh Pinellas County and Olachua County that were designed to carry, you

1:38:36know, upwards of uh twelve to twenty people at a time. So we said, hey, we need to get one of those. Well, fortunately, after the whole event was over, our uh our friends at Bayonet Point Hospital donated fifty thousand dollars to the fire department for something like that. So we took that fifty thousand dollars and we saw it out to, you know, can we get some of those buses here in Pasco County specifically for that? So we now in the future we would have a way to move a lot of people uh uh very quickly. So we

1:39:06took that, that was our our that our started money starting money for the project, and then we entered into an agreement with the school corporation, Pasco County Schools. We're very, very fortunate to work with them and they were able to give us a couple of of school buses. They donated the two school buses that we ended up making into these vehicles. We also got a grant from the state of Florida that allowed us to buy the equipment that that will allow now uh To put patients in the back of ambulance or in the back of the bus laying down and be able to take care of them that way. But more

1:39:37importantly, we had a lot of our own employees put a lot of sweat equity. They actually built what you're gonna see out there here in a few minutes. They built all of that stuff themselves with all that equipment that was donated. They put it all together. We were able to get the paint job. Uh it wasn't donated, but it was dramatically. Discounted. Same thing with the striping package. The l the lighting that you see on there, a lot of it was um uh done by our own employees, but also through discounts from various local vendors here in Pasco County. Next slide.

1:40:09We also had the same um situation with these special operations trailers. So special operations, it covers a lot of ground and we've amassed a lot of equipment because a lot of what they do, you know, may only use it once every few years, but when you need it, you need it. So there's a lot of heavy, heavy equipment that we have to carry around. And some of it, since we don't use it very often, we put it on these trailers. So when we do need it, we have it tucked away. Somewhere here that we can deploy it. So we have a couple of these uh big semi-trailers uh that we got 100%

1:40:40donated uh from Great Bay Distributors, which you may recognize those as former beer trucks. They um I'm not sure which company they worked for, but we did get them from them, including the uh the semi-tractor that's gonna pull them. Same thing with the paint job and the striping packages and and some lighting that was done on all those. All that was done through uh donations and uh sweat equity. Next slide.

1:41:06So you see there, just through the process over the last six years, partnering with our community has saved it says thousands of dollars, but it's probably more likely hundreds of thousands of dollars and has uh brought our special operations program to where it is today. Next slide.

1:41:22So I I specifically wanted to mention these particular partners that we've worked with over the last six years. Uh of course Bayonet Point Hospital, uh Bayonet Point Medical Center, Great Bay Distributors, Pasco County School Board. Pasco Health and Medical Preparedness Coalition. Pasco County Health Department. King Auto Body. And most importantly, all of our hardworking employees at Fire Rescue that put a lot of time and effort into making uh this project a reality. Next slide.

1:41:50Very cool.

1:41:52So that's the end of the

1:41:54here.

1:41:55That is all here. Yeah. So that's why you saw the barricades.

1:41:59That's why they have it blocked.

1:42:00Yeah, we had the barricades out there last night. So thank you to the

1:42:03blocked off from

1:42:04the uh Dade City Police Department who worked to to organize that for us. But we did bring some of that equipment that you saw there in the uh slides out there. So you're more than welcome. I know we want to do this right before lunch break. So if you you wanna take five minutes and walk around you can see some of the equipment up close. Yeah