By Adam Foxman
Ventura County Star
VENTURA, Calif.— While most of us use days off to unwind, a small group of local paramedics, nurses and doctors spends theirs volunteering as airborne rescuers.
The distinctive yellow and blue helicopters of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Air Unit fly about 900 missions a year, and a volunteer from the Sheriff’s Search and Rescue Medical Team is on board for almost every one, officials said.
“You’re not talking about volunteering at your soup kitchen; these are highly trained professionals who have taken the extra step of putting themselves in harm’s way to provide this service,” said Steve Carroll, administrator for the county’s emergency medical services agency.
“I think they truly are heroes, and they’re unsung heroes to a great extent,” said Carroll, a former member of the volunteer team.
The volunteers are an integral part of the Air Unit’s helicopter crews. In addition to working on the medical parts of missions, they help plan rescues and assist the pilot and two sheriff’s crew chiefs in looking for hazards.
The crew chiefs are also emergency medical technicians, but the medical team volunteers are usually the only people on the helicopter with training in advanced life support, said Dr. Jerry Maryniuk, an emergency room physician and longtime member of the team.
When people see them with the helicopter unit, many assume they are sheriff’s deputies. It’s an easy assumption to make. On hand at the unit’s Camarillo Airport headquarters every day and on call every night, the volunteers wear the same green jumpsuits as the Air Unit’s deputies, train with them and respond to the same emergencies.
One man who got to know members of the Air Unit after they rescued him was surprised to learn a volunteer was involved.
“I’ve never been told,” said Glen Fritzler, 50, who was airlifted by the unit after he crashed his mountain bike over a cliff in Santa Barbara County in 2006. “Dealing with aircraft - it’s so highly skilled that I just envisioned it as a paid position,” said Fritzler, who feels the Air Unit saved his life.
Enjoying a challenge
Why spend your downtime from the life-and-death situation of your job to work in an even tougher assignment for free?
“This is what we thrive on; this is what tests our skills,” said medical team captain Dana Sullivan, 45, of Oxnard. “When things aren’t going 90 mph, we’re bored,” she joked.
Many of the volunteers also share a love for Ventura County’s backcountry, an advantage in the Air Unit’s line of work.
Maryniuk said that while returning from flights looking for lost or injured people in the backcountry, he’s spotted places where he later returned to hike or bike.
“I’d bring my memories of what we saw from the air, a topographical map, and do incredible explorations,” said Maryniuk, a volunteer team member since 1989.
Many volunteers also say they love the camaraderie of the tight-knit team and the chance to help others.
Volunteers typically work 10-hour shifts and are on call at night. The minimum commitment is one day a month, but many do more. For many of the roughly 30 volunteers on the team, the shift is possible because they work compressed schedules at their regular jobs.
Sullivan works 24-hour shifts as a paramedic, 10 or 12 days a month, she said. That shift enables her to volunteer for the Air Unit about 40 hours a month and still find time to train for triathalons.
The volunteers have donated their skills in most of the major disasters in the county’s recent history, including the 2000 crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261, the 2005 La Conchita landslide and the 2008 Metrolink crash in Chatsworth.
A boon for the budget
The Air Unit costs about $5 million a year to run. If the county had to pay medical personnel to staff the helicopters, it would likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars more each year, sheriff’s officials said.
In 2009, the volunteers were involved in about 150 medical rescues, sheriff’s officials said.
“The county is a lot safer with them,” said sheriff’s Capt. Dave Kenney, who leads the Air Unit.
The most active of the seven volunteer teams attached to the Sheriff’s Department, the medical team dates back to 1974, three years after the Air Unit was established.
Ventura County didn’t yet have an organized emergency medical services system then. Since emergency responders had only basic first-aid training, a group of doctors saw a need to have more advanced medical expertise on the Air Unit, Maryniuk said.
A small group of doctors set up an advisory board and began volunteering to fly in the helicopter on emergency calls, said Maryniuk, 55, of Ventura. Helicopter pilots would pick up a doctor from the roof of a local hospital when they headed to a medical emergency, then drop them off when they were done.
Rule change helped
As the team grew, nurses got involved, and policies were set up for them to work on their own away from doctors and a hospital. Paramedics were added in the early 1990s, when policies that previously said they could work only with another paramedic were changed to allow them to work with EMT partners, Carroll said. Thanks in part to a partnership with ambulance companies, most of the medic volunteers are now paramedics.
Those with firsthand experience with the Air Unit have high praise for its medical personnel.
“Those guys are absolutely miraculous,” said Chip Bartley, who watched the unit rescue a critically injured paraglider from the side of Conejo Mountain in 2006. Bartley, 44, of Camarillo, was preparing to paraglide off the mountain when a fellow paraglider crashed into the steep slope just after takeoff.
A former combat medic in the Marine Corps, Bartley gave the man first aid until the Air Unit arrived.
“Their triage was amazing,” he recalled.
Copyright 2010 Ventura County Star