Dawson's View

It’s a hot day beside the four-lane highway 20 minutes south of Martinsburg, West Virginia.

We sit on a bench, with a huge multi-million dollar firehouse behind us. There are pumpers and stores of equipment that some big city stations might well envy. It is a new headquarters for the Citizen’s Fire Company. After a very long record of service on the west end of Charles Town, WV, Citizen’s hauled up and left for a duty station on the major highway in the area. The suburbs, such as they are here, with acres of houses sitting no more than 10 feet apart, are common and becoming even more so. There is propane power everywhere. Water is much less plentiful, and the fire companies have recourse to tanker trucks in suburban areas. The wind, fire and clusters of houses in a row are a recipe for disaster.

But more familiar horrors are not hard to find. The teenagers, and sometimes younger kids, are crumpled in motor vehicle accidents. The Maryland Medevac lands here and delivers some of them to the long road to better health. The fire company does mutual aid for its neighbors when it isn’t so busy at home base. It is busy. There have been 16 hazardous-materials spills between January and April. Very high pollen counts mean engine calls for respiratory emergencies. Yes, this is a fire company. It does not have an ambulance. It does have a first-class rescue truck and not a few firefighters who like EMS well enough to cross-train as EMTs. Citizen’s has three medics, seven EMTs and 11 more EMTs in training. There are 58 firefighter volunteers here. About a third of them are connected to EMS as well. Maybe the first response tone-outs have convinced them of the wisdom of being fire-EMS folk. This is compounded by the fact that the medics come by intercept in a flycar, and so leave Citizen’s crew doing extrications and rudimentary stabilizations because they have no other choice. After the Korean War, the company did less than 200 calls a year. Right now, 700+ calls are the rule. Nobody gets paid. Worse still, the crews do not sleep in. Members respond to the house or to the site. The building is gorgeous. There is no softball team, no bowling league.

The men and women (11 of them) who actually ride here do not have work release with their employers. Shift work is common enough that the daytime shifts present less of a coverage problem than is true in the neighboring areas like Harpers Ferry. The sprawl in the area is a huge problem on the horizon. Too little fire and EMS coverage for too many people—people compacted into row after row of nearly overlapping houses—is a potential nightmare. Some 120 condos located a few hundred yards north of this huge modern firehouse do not have a firm commitment for continuing water from the area’s water supply company.

What is this place? Who are these people? Donnie Dawson sits beside me on the bench, and we exchange war stories. Child abuse in West Virginia isn’t so different from what you might encounter in New York City. He hates seeing kids sick and dying. The horror of seeing primary school kids while working his day job as a county and “city” employee, then scraping them up off the highway eight to 10 years later when they get cars is something he tries to live with! Thirty-nine years of fire duty does not help him shake it. Sitting on the bench and staring at the road doesn’t help matters. It is as if he sees the ghosts of both the living seven-year-olds and the maimed and/or dying 17-year-olds dancing before him as the sun intensifies the glare on the road. And yet, some of his patients turn around and thank him later. Donnie Dawson is the first responder’s first responder. Donnie Dawson is a first-class Certified Emergency Rescue Technician instructor. He denies that he is EMS, but it is apparent that he is one of the EMS crowd too. He cheats death every day. He laughs at incomprehensible saves and celebrates inexplicable ones.