Peninsula In Passage

“We were all volunteers and could not be there 24 hours a day, so my dad would drop everything to answer the phone and track down someone in the squad to answer the call,’’ Jodie Matthews said. Kevin Alston, Assistant Superintendent of Suffolk Public Schools, joined the rescue squad when he was 16 and remembers - We got training by watching World War II

military training films. Back then we could ride the ambulance at 16 and did the weekend shifts. The squad was started with lots of Ruritans and the first squad headquarters was in an old guard shack on College Drive. The first ambulance looked just like the one in the Ghostbusters movie. The first time I saw action I was the sole attendant on an ambulance responding to an accident in Pughsville. Two passengers were thrown from a car that was upside down in street. In the second incident we were called to a home off Nansemond Parkway where a woman was having a baby in a room without electrical power. I ended up holding the flashlight while the others cut the umbilical cord. When my sister was having her baby in the blizzard of 1980 my family had to put her on a tractor to get her to U. S. 17 where the Rescue Squad was waiting to transport her to the hospital. The rescue squad offered lots of camaraderie and helped me learn

community service and life-saving skills I still have today. After years of serving their community the rescue squad volunteers faced their own crisis in 2003. The Virginia Office of Emergency Medical Services found two significant problems with the squad – a lack of working ambulances and lack of volunteers to fill out qualified crews for emergency calls. Some members had been called away on military duty – others left because of dissension within the squad. Local news stories reported that the number of households in the Bennett’s Creek area had grown by almost 50% to 8,500 between 2001 and 2003 magnifying the need for emergency services.

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