Volunteer team trains hard, responds when called

BOULDER – Aron Armstrong had a pretty heady month of June for a 21-year-old university student.

There was a missing hiker near Gross Reservoir, an underwater recovery of a swimmer killed in a viscous undertow in the St. Vrain Creek, a fruitless search of South Boulder Creek and the inlet of Gross Reservoir for the body of a 55-year-old woman who had fallen into the stream.

In his spare time, Armstrong could be found practicing underwater rescues at Gross with a good number of the other rescue experts from the Boulder Emergency Squad.

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“We spent 20 minutes trying to resuscitate (22-year-old victim) from the St. Vrain,” Armstrong recalled. Unfortunately, the efforts were to no avail.

But for all the pitfalls of water rescue in Boulder County, that’s not Armstrong’s least favorite part of the job, because the Boulder Emergency Squad also does vehicle extrication from severe accidents.

“Some of those get pretty hairy.”

And for almost four decades now, the Boulder Emergency Squad has been there when things get pretty “hairy” in Boulder County – or just when you need them the most.

From vehicle extrications from catastrophic vehicle collisions to dramatic swift-water rescues and most everything in between, this all-volunteer outfit is on call 24/7. The Boulder Emergency Squad services most of Boulder County from U.S. Highway 287 west to the Continental Divide, from Nelson Road in Longmont, south the county line.

Large coverage area

The squad is there when you need them in the high country, in the spring’s raging water, in the winter’s snowy car pileups. Smaller municipalities, including Louisville and Lafayette, use the squad’s services so they don’t have to buy expensive extrication equipment, for instance. Municipal and rural fire departments use its services to augment their own, as do a host of emergency officials around the county.

Now they could use your help.

The Boulder Emergency Squad was the beneficiary of $1.8 million in bond proceeds in 2002, which allowed the unit to build a new facility at 47th Street and the Diagonal Highway and also buy new vehicles. But the cost of maintenance for both its new headquarters and vehicles already is putting the budget into the red, said Assistant Chief Lori Swenson.

“We could easily use another $30,000 to $60,000 a year,” Swenson said.

The Boulder Emergency Squad is much like a volunteer fire department, except for one huge difference. Unlike fire protection districts or departments, it has no tax revenues.

The squad mostly depends on Boulder County government, which contributes about $40,000 a year to the budget. The city of Boulder contributes another $6,000.

But at least $20,000 to $30,000 annually comes in from business and individual donations, which helps offset the cost of maintenance and also the extensive training all 40 of the Boulder Emergency Squad volunteers undertake each year.

Because the various specialties – such as swift-water, dive and extrication rescues that each volunteer must maintain – each member of the squad usually puts in about 200 hours of training each year. That’s about double the number for many volunteer fire departments.

“Most of our people are engineers, landlords, truck drivers or housewives,´ said Swenson, herself a mechanical engineer at Storage Technology Corp. in Louisville. “We have one police officer and one firefighter.”

And these volunteers average almost one call each day – 360 calls in 2002, in fact. Unfortunately, the squad lacks the one thing that tends to hold volunteer fire departments together – a pension fund that is usually bankrolled through tax dollars.

Still the squad has been able to keep together a very skilled group of volunteers. In fact, Chief Bryan Dillman has been with the squad since it was formed 38 years ago.

“We have many members with years of experience and training,” Swenson said.

“There’s a core group of about 10 people who represent about 200 collective years of experience.”

And even without tax dollars, the Boulder Emergency Squad has been able to keep together that mix of experience and youthful exuberance that forms a critical mass for any volunteer emergency group.

“It’s good to see that mix,” Swenson mused. “You get to see the young people who jump into the truck evolve into the people who think, ‘this is going to be a long call, perhaps I should go to the bathroom first.'”

For Aron Armstrong, the call to jump into the truck has been strong. A political science major at the University of Colorado, the Florida native already has years of diving experience and developed quite a taste for emergency work.

“This (dive rescue) is what I’m hoping to make into my career,” he said.