By Jared Wenzelburger / Fairfax County Times
A team of 80 firefighters from across Fairfax County began loading gear into semi-trucks on Sept. 24 for deployment to Florida in response to Hurricane Helene.
FEMA activated Virginia Task Force 1 in Fairfax County, Virginia Task Force 2 in Virginia Beach, and four other teams from across the nation. They arrived at their staging location on Sept. 25, hours after Governor Glenn Youngkin declared a state of emergency for the Commonwealth.
With extensive FEMA deployment experience, the task force is “recognized throughout the United States and the world as a premier leader in disaster response and the provision of training in catastrophic event mitigation, readiness and recovery,” according to the agency’s website.
Virginia Task Force 1 was notified of the deployment at 11 a.m. on Tuesday and prepared to leave for Florida about three hours later. Firefighters notified their families they would be gone for roughly two weeks—or longer if the mission called for it.
“This storm is forecasted to have a tremendously large storm surge,” said Planning Section Chief John Morrison. “We encourage people who live in that area to heed the warnings of emergency management officials.”
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the storm developed from a tropical cyclone into a hurricane on Wednesday as wind speeds continued to rise.
“Helene is expected to bring a life-threatening storm surge, damaging winds, and flood rains to a large portion of Florida and the southeast United States,” NOAA stated in a post on X. “Devastating hurricane-force winds are expected across portions of northern Florida and southern Georgia where the core of Helene moves inland.”
Virginia Task Force 1 comprises emergency managers, planners, physicians, paramedics, doctors, structural engineers, hazardous materials specialists, heavy rigging crews, K-9 units, and search and rescue teams.
Swift water rescue boats, all-terrain vehicles, and other equipment began their journey to Florida, followed by a bus full of highly trained search and rescue crews and four K-9s ready to assist in efforts to save lives.
Jennifer Heiner, a lifelong resident of Northern Virginia, is one of nine women on the Fairfax County-based team being deployed to Florida. She has been with Fairfax County Fire and Rescue for 14 years and has been deployed nearly a dozen times, she said.
“There’s going to be a lot of flooding, a lot of people that need help getting out of their homes,” said Heiner. “We’re going to help them get out of their homes and get somewhere safe. There’s a lot of elderly (people) in Florida, so we’re getting those people out who may not have family to help them.”
As part of the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department, the task force maintains constant operational readiness for local, national and international responses.
The Fairfax County task force is one of 28 search and rescue teams across the U.S. available for national deployment and one of just two available for international deployment. The task force’s most recent mission brought a team to South Carolina in response to Tropical Storm Debby in August. Other past missions include responding to earthquakes in Turkey and Japan, coordinating an incident support team during President Barack Obama’s inauguration, and responding to the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
“One of the great things is we can take all the lessons we learn when we deploy domestically for large disasters and bring that back home,” said Morrison. “We are better rescuers locally because of the work we do both domestically and internationally.”