Bedford Firefighters and Paramedics Confront Covid-19

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of stories about workers who show up every day to continue to make sure the systems we depend on are safe and secure

Firefighters doing what they do best – using their ingenuity to solve problems, adapting a Scott pack and spray gun to decontaminate an ambulance with a hospital-grade disinfectant

Bedford firefighters and paramedics are confronting the Covid-19 pandemic head-on every day, through ambulance transport to the hospital.

They are not backing down.

“I can’t tell you enough good things about our staff,” Chief David Grunes declared. “Every member of the department has risen to the occasion. Firefighters taking leave over the past month have been non-existent. Everyone is showing up to meet the challenge, taking personal responsibility so as not to put a burden on anybody else.”

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“The biggest thing I’m worried about is our staff, physically and mentally,” Chief Grunes said. “You want to provide them a level of safety, you want them to have the best tools around. They feel supported, which is great. But with information happening so quickly, there still so much unknown out there. The information is coming so quickly. A lot of times today’s information contradicts yesterday’s.”

Even veteran firefighters are shaking their heads with wonder, he continued. “We always felt we were in control. There’s a fire? Eventually, you are able to put it out. This is different.”

Matt Hansen is a second-generation Bedford firefighter who joined the force in 2001. “People say, “Well, that’s the job you signed up for.’ But nothing like this ever was considered by the guys. We know there will be fires, and downed wires, and hazardous materials, and combative patients in the ambulance. All kinds of stuff. But something at this level I had never thought of.”

“One of the paramedics said to me, ‘Maybe we’ll go to an accident or a fire, but 24 hours a day we are focused on Covid’,” the chief continued. “Every discussion we are having is about this. Today I was on five conference calls. We are coordinating with the VA, coordinating with Lahey, all related to how we are going to work through this. It is becoming all-consuming.”

Firefighter Chris Snowden concurred, saying, “We go to every single call with the assumption that Covid-19 is involved. It’s the central topic of our daily conversation.”

After a lull of a couple of weeks, calls to the Fire Department began ramping up this week, Chief Grunes said. Most all of the ambulance calls are for residents with “symptoms similar to Covid-19,” edging up from two to three per day. There are also calls from patients with mental health issues, he added.

“People probably don’t want to go to the hospital,” Hansen observed about the decline in rescue calls. “And with employment centers, our population normally triples during the weekdays. We don’t have that workforce population in town right now.”

Almost all transports are to Lahey Hospital in Burlington. During the past week, there were several calls to transport Covid-19 patients living in the nursing care units at Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Administration Medical Center on Springs Road.

“We are preparing to treat patients differently than we treated them in the past – the protocols associated with our responses are changing daily, if not hourly,” Chief Grunes said. Masks and gloves and gowns aren’t a problem. “We have a strong inventory of personal protective equipment.”

Snowden, who joined the department almost a year ago, said that there is great emphasis on “the proper donning and doffing of our personal protective equipment (PPE). Wearing the appropriate gear mitigates our exposure and spreading it to families and co-workers.

Proper wearing of protective equipment usually is part of standard training, Snowden said. For example, masks are personally tested for fitting through the use of a noxious smelling agent – if it penetrates, that calls for a refit. These masks, he noted, up to now, were used when transporting tuberculosis patients.

“Yesterday I wore a Tyvek suit – that was something new to me, an enhanced level of PPE that typically isn’t worn on a daily basis,” he continued. “Now, we wear it every day on calls because of high suspicion of Covid.”

“Before this, paramedics would go right into the house,” Hansen said. “Now, we send one paramedic in, sometimes two. When this started, we put on face masks and gloves. Now it’s the gowns, masks, gloves, and face shields.”

“The chief signs off all of his emails with the words ‘Go slow’,” Snowden said. “I put my PPE on methodically and make sure it is on appropriately.”

Hansen said the staff feels that their equipment and environment are safe. “We are isolating as much as we can – (at the station) we’re basically in a house, where we eat and sleep.”

Although there’s a higher level of stress, morale in the department is good, Snowden said. “We are handling it well. We are all professionals. If this is what the current climate is, we are ready to help out.” Snowden and his wife have a four-month-old child, and he acknowledged, “It’s a risk that you could potentially bring home to your family. That adds to the stress for sure.”

Hansen said his wife is a nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital; they coordinate their schedules but aren’t together at the same time very much with their two children, one who is three and the other nine months. “Her job puts things in perspective for me,” he said — an emergency call in Bedford can take maybe an hour from departure to return.

The firefighters said they feel supported by the command staff and town leadership. “We get updates daily on how the country is, how Bedford is, from the town manager, the chief, and the captains,” Snowden said.

“Sometimes it takes an event like this for people to realize the value of firefighters and paramedics,” Hansen commented. He recalled joining the force shortly before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001. Firefighters reached unprecedented levels of admiration and respect, and “I was blown away.”

“A lot of us go into the fire service because it’s not a mundane job,” Snowden said. “You’ve got to be fluid and flexible. This is just one of those situations.”

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As Chris Snowdon’s paternal grandparents, my wife and I could not be anymore proud of Chris than we are right now. Chris has always been interested in helping others and his job as a firefighter, which he loves, allows him to help people at their most desperate time of need. At times I know that his job can require a great deal of courage and agility, both mental as well as physical, and I don’t know of anyone who I would rather have come to my rescue than Chris.

Ken and Bev Snowdon.

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