By Elizabethe Holland
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)
Copyright 2006 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.
When a woman who took part in rescue attempts at Castlewood State Park called a fire district official in hopes of working through feelings of remorse, she learned her state of mind wasn’t at all unusual.
She also learned there’s a name for the mixed bag of emotions she was dealing with — “rescuer’s lament” — and that emergency workers who respond to traumatic events quite often endure the same thing. Some emergency agencies require their employees who respond to particularly distressing calls to participate in counseling sessions. In the Metro West Fire Protection District in west St. Louis County, Chief Vince Loyal has requested that any employee who was called to the Meramec River where five young people drowned on Sunday participate in such a session today. The district also has invited employees of the West County EMS & Fire Protection District, several of whom responded as well.
Metro West alone dispatched nearly 20 workers to the park Sunday, but it turned out there wasn’t much they could do to help. Five young people on a church outing slipped into deep water and drowned. One boy was pulled from the water, treated by paramedics and survived.
A funeral for four of the five will be held at 11 a.m. today at the St. Louis Dream Center. Arrangements for the fifth victim are pending.
Dealing with trauma and death are part of the job for firefighters, paramedics and police, but some incidents — particularly those involving children and multiple deaths — are especially hard to deal with.
“There is no way you can go to an incident where there are five children killed and expect to sleep well that night,” Loyal said. “But if you don’t sleep for three weeks, that’s another thing.”
The potential for such a stress-filled response is why Metro West’s crew is gathering today.
“There is going to be some grief or some disappointment,” Loyal said. “And we will answer more calls in Castlewood State Park. We run a lot of calls in that park and we don’t want someone who has to respond there to have it impact them in their job.”
The session, which will be closed to the public, will be run by the Greater St. Louis Region Critical Incident Stress Management Team, a volunteer group that offers help to emergency workers on both sides of the Mississippi.
The team, which formed in 1991, has two main purposes: to educate workers on stress management and to provide crisis-intervention services, said Sally Frese, the team’s coordinator.
Today’s session will involve a mental health counselor and a fellow emergency worker trained as a peer counselor.
“It’s a chance for everybody to just get this off their chest,” said Metro West Chief Medical Officer Bud Mantle, who talked to Terry Meza of Manchester — a bystander who helped at the river Sunday — and referred her to Frese.
There are always people who insist they don’t need the sessions, Frese said. “But,” she said, “some piece of the puzzle they add may be helpful to somebody else.”