EMERSON— Brownie Troop 97609 charmed the Emerson Volunteer Ambulance Corps (EVAC) on April 24 in a visit. The scouts toured the ambulance and learned from volunteers about the important things EVAC does when someone calls 9-1-1.
EVAC provides emergency medical services to the Borough of Emerson and neighboring towns. It notes online that every year it touches the lives of hundreds of patients and their families.
EVAC treasurer and publicity chair Maureen Howlin told Pascack Press this group of youngsters, in pursuit of badges in Life Skills, was particularly engaged and curious and asked lots of great questions.
“It was very hands-on and a lot of fun. At the end we bandaged one of the kids up — showed them how we treat lacerations, and so forth,” she said.
Community outreach is picking up, she said, and EVAC looks forward to resuming school visits. Right now the corps is participating in a staged DWI accident scenario at the firehouse for the benefit of high school seniors. “It involves the fire department, the ambulance, the coroner and everything. It’s pretty realistic.”
She noted, too, that working on the ambulance corps makes for happy marriages: there are two married couples in EVAC, including hers, to EVAC secretary and fellow EMT George Howlin.
At the end of June neither Maureen nor George will be EMTs “but still involved with EVAC, giving a lot of our time. We are both life members: a status earned after 10 years of active membership,” Maureen said.
She added, “We both were EMTs since 2004. I’m not riding anymore but I’m still involved as an officer. George’s EMT certification expires at the end of June but he is riding when needed until then. He may continue riding as a driver after June.”
She referred questions on recruitment — EVAC has banners downtown strongly urging volunteers sign up — to veteran EVAC Capt. Mike Davis, who, with his wife, Janine, has been with the corps 20 years. They’re both EMTs.
After his full-time job ended for the day on May 11, Davis told us, “We, along with all the other EMS services in the area, have seen a decline in membership — and recently, because of the pandemic and having lost our building because of the redevelopment downtown, we lost a number of members and that has put us in a position where we have a tremendous staffing shortage.”
He said, “Now that we’re kind of past the hurdle of the pandemic, and we’ve gotten temporary accommodations from the borough for a place to park the trucks and a facility that we can use as a meeting room and offices and whatnot [including beds, at a town-owned house on Locust Street], we’re trying to rebuild the department.”
Davis said, “Since the first of the year we’ve gotten nine new applications; we’re looking to get 30 new members in total, so we’re a third of the way there.”
He said, “Unfortunately, it takes a decent amount of time to get these new members trained so we can actually staff the truck, and the EMT course is offered only twice a year.”
Most new members are going to be getting trained in September and will be certified December and into January, 2023. “So we might not see a tremendous change immediately but we’re working in the right direction.”
Davis said, “We had 10–15 active, riding members before, coming into this year we had probability four or five active riding members, so that really was a tremendous decline.”
He said some members moved out of town and others have stopped riding “because of the conditions,” by which he meant due to Covid and owing to the loss of their headquarters.
(Borough Administrator Robert G. Hermansen told us on May 12 that he was set to meet this week with the architect and builder on the Borough Hall project, that progress was being made on a new EVAC HQ as part of the work, and that the borough has been responsive to every volunteer need brought forward. He said next steps and revised estimates would be forthcoming.)
Davis said EVAC needs drivers and, prominently, EMTs. The majority of EVAC’s volunteers are trained at the Bergen County EMS Training Center in Paramus. Some training is covered by the state and some by the borough.
Meanwhile, residents of the borough and the Pascack Valley continue to fall victim to injuries and illnesses requiring ambulance dispatch.
“If anything, the demand is up — and across the board not just volunteer but also aid services are having a hard time finding employees to staff ambulances. there’s a real big shortage not just across the state but also across the country,” Davis said.
He added, “Unfortunately a paid service isn’t an end-all solution because there are only so many paid employees available as well. So we’ve found when we have a good group of volunteers that works out well.”
Davis said recruiting has been helped by social media, banners throughout town, flyers at local businesses, the downtown message board, and Mayor Danielle DiPaola’s announcements at town council meetings and other events. “Every little bit, you never know.”
Interested in volunteering? Write evac@emersonnj.org.