By TAYLOR WOOTEN, the Daily Journal
After more than two weeks assisting in search and rescue efforts in Surfside, Florida, first responders from Task Force No. 1 are back home again in Indiana — and some have brought COVID-19 cases with them.
The team of 80 first responders — including five from Johnson County — worked on the ground at the site of the Champlain Towers South building collapse. The residential building in Surfside, a suburb of Miami, collapsed June 24, leaving at least 97 people dead and 12 unaccounted for as of Friday.
The task force departed by bus for the Miami area June 30. The group spent weeks meticulously searching through the debris in temperamental weather conditions and with little sleep.
Prior to their departure from Florida, all members of the task force were tested for COVID-19 as a precaution. Some tested positive, Indianapolis Fire Department spokesperson Rita Reith said in a statement.
“As part of standard protocol and in preparation for their return home, IN-TF1 members were tested for COVID and several of our members have tested positive,” Reith said in the statement. “These members have been isolated from the rest of the group and are being transported home in a rented mini-van.”
Non-vaccinated members will be retested following their return home, along with those who believe their positive test to be a false positive, according to the statement. Based on the location of the deployment, it is likely the cases are the Delta variant, Reith said in the statement.
The number of positive cases were a small percentage of the team, said Mike Pruitt, deputy chief of the Bargersville Fire Department. Pruitt could not provide a number of cases or say whether any of the cases were among the five Johnson County first responders who traveled with the task force.
Among the group are Justin Laraway, Rob Stecher and Chad Tatman of the Greenwood Fire Department, Sean Campbell of the Bargersville Community Fire Department, and Dan McElyea of the Franklin Fire Department.
Laraway, a rescue specialist, said it was an amazing feeling to return home to his wife and two young daughters. This was his longest deployment during his time with the task force, at 17 days. He worked the night shift, digging through the rubble in hopes of giving closure to families and friends of the collapse victims.
“It’s nothing like I’ve ever dealt with before,” Laraway said.
Initially, Pruitt said he expected the cleanup efforts to go on for a month. However, a statement from Miami-Dade County late Thursday said the task of identifying victims had become increasingly difficult, relying heavily on the medical examiner’s office and expert technical and scientific work.
The quicker work may have been due to a few days where the teams recovered 20 missing persons within two shifts, Laraway said. This was aided by Israeli search and rescue teams that had the expertise to locate victims more quickly, he said.
Despite the fact that the team was unable to find survivors in the rubble, the work was done carefully. The Miami area has a strong Jewish population, which was kept in mind as the first responders sought out and handled victims, Laraway said.
“Although we didn’t recover human life, we respected every human remain recovered,” he said.
