Phil Gust didn`t need to see the car that crashed one recent Friday night to know where it was.
A strong smell of gasoline, a twisted metal guardrail, mangled mailboxes, and a torn up honeysuckle hedge all led to the car, which had landed about 75 feet off River Road, just east of McHenry. Its front end was smashed in, its passenger side and rear windows were blown out.
Gust, though, did need help finding the driver.
”He`s sitting inside my house,” announced Patty Lobinsky, the owner of a home at the accident site. ”The kid just walked in, asked to use our phone to call his mother, and then pulled out a chair and sat down. I can`t believe it, but he looks fine.”
And so he was. Although he had crashed through about 30 feet of metal guardrail and shrubbery before flipping his Mitsubishi Mirage into the Lobinsky`s front yard, 18-year-old Jeff Stanish of McHenry walked away with barely a scratch. A small cut on one knee was so minor that he and his mother decided there was no need for him to go to the local hospital.
That was a happy ending to a McHenry Township Fire Protection District rescue call that easily could have been a tragedy.
”Funny,” said Gust during the ride back to fire station No.1 in McHenry, where he is a volunteer firefighter and paramedic. ”We`ve seen people walk away from accidents where the cars were mangled. Other times, you can have an accident where the cars don`t look too bad but someone is killed.”
Gust has seen a lot of that during 20 years as a paramedic and firefighter, as have most of McHenry`s fire protection district volunteers.
According to Firehouse magazine, an industry trade journal that last year did a national survey of fire-rescue districts, the McHenry Township Fire Protection District`s 120 regular volunteers and 2,200 calls annually make it the largest all-volunteer fire district in Illinois and one of the largest in the nation.
(According to Fire Call, a magazine published by the Illinois Association of Fire Protection Districts, Tinley Park is the second largest all-volunteer department with 70 volunteers.)
”I don`t know of any other volunteer department that`s even close to being as big as McHenry`s,” said Sandy Hill, administrative assistant in the personnel standards division of the Illinois state fire marshal`s office in Springfield. ”A lot of volunteer fire departments are hurting for money and volunteers. McHenry obviously doesn`t have those problems.”
In fact, while many volunteer fire districts go begging for help, the McHenry Township Fire Protection District has a waiting list of people who would like to join.
One reason for the fire protection district`s good fortune is people like Gust, a full-time emergency medical services employee in Skokie who doubles as one of McHenry`s assistant fire chiefs.
”I love the work,” said Gust, a charter member of the McHenry Rescue Squad, which was formed in 1972 and merged with the fire protection district in 1983. The fire protection district has been in existence since the 1930s.
”There are lots of lights and sirens and excitement, and I`m a kid at heart, and I got hooked,” Gust said. ”The job can be pretty demanding, but you get a lot of satisfaction knowing that you`re doing something for the community, helping people when they really need help.”
As a full-time rescue worker in Skokie, Gust works 24-hour shifts with the next 48 hours off duty. Those 48 hours off give him a chance to volunteer in McHenry. The same is true for 16 other fire district volunteers, who work similar schedules as full-time rescue workers in other suburban communities.
Gust and other McHenry Township Fire Protection District volunteers have dealt with a wide array of fire and rescue calls through the years. They`ve had personally tragic ones, including one during Gust`s second year as a McHenry volunteer, when two of his fellow volunteer paramedics fell through the ice and drowned while snowmobiling on McCullom Lake in McHenry.
They`ve had offbeat calls, such as the one two years ago when a runaway locomotive from Crystal Lake slammed into a Metra commuter train parked at the McHenry train station. No one was seriously hurt, but the collision propelled the rammed train down the track, where it ended up blocking traffic on Illinois Highway 120, the busiest street in town.
And they`ve had interesting calls, including one last year at a farm north of town, where a grain bin had caught fire. Dale Freund and his family served the firefighters a lunch of sausages, sauerkraut and pies for dessert as they fought the fire and helped empty Freund`s grain bin of the unburned corn.
”That was probably the most fun I`ve ever had as a volunteer,” said Pat Arnold, owner of Arnold Electric in McHenry and a volunteer based in the fire protection district`s Johnsburg station, about 1/2 miles northeast of McHenry. ”We had a good old-fashioned farm lunch. And it was great seeing all the other farmers from the area who showed up to help one of their own.”
Arnold said he has wanted to be a fireman most of his life, ever since growing up in Chicago across the street from a neighborhood fire station. He also had an uncle who was a Chicago fireman.
”I`ve always been around firemen,” Arnold said, ”and I always wanted to be one. So I volunteer here.”
Yet for Arnold and many of the McHenry Township Fire Protection District volunteers, their job sometimes means more than putting out fires and answering medical rescue calls. Their work earlier this year at the 4 C`s Camp on the shores of Pistakee Lake near Johnsburg is a case in point.
The camp, which is run by the private Council for Physically Challenged Children (formerly the Chicago Club for Crippled Children, hence the camp`s name), sits on a steep hill that runs down to Pistakee Lake. Earlier this year, the only entrance that a fire truck possibly could have negotiated was blocked by thick brush and trees. And to make matters worse, the camp had about 40 wheelchair-bound youngsters during the summer but had no wheelchair ramps outside the dormitories where they were staying.
”We answered a couple of rescue calls there for handicapped kids who had fallen out of bed, and after we looked at the place, we decided that if we ever got a fire call there, we wouldn`t even pull the hoses off the trucks,” Arnold said. ”We`d first have everyone run through the buildings to try to get the kids out.”
But any firefighter will tell you that the best way to fight a fire is to prevent one. With prevention uppermost in the firefighters` minds, they decided to fix up the 4 C`s Camp.
So one afternoon last summer, about 20 of them arrived at the camp with chain saws, axes, shovels, hammers, nails and lumber.
They cut down trees and brush so that a fire truck could easily reach the buildings, and they built wheelchair ramps and walkways to connect the dormitories and make it easier for camp counselors to move the children about. ”They were great,” said Thomas Hibbs, 4 C`s Camp caretaker. ”They just showed up and started working. They donated their time and all the materials. They even brought a fire truck here for the kids to play on.”
The McHenry Township Fire Protection District hasn`t always been so big or busy, though. Its 120 volunteers is a record number, and its 2,200 calls a year is a result of the growth the region has seen in recent years. The fire district covers about 54 square miles with a population of about 40,000 people, about twice as many as 20 years ago.
Fire district volunteers also haven`t always been as well-trained as they are today.
”When I joined in 1959, they fitted me out with a coat and a helmet and told me to show up for fires,” said John Shay, executive director of the McHenry County Emergency Services Disaster Agency and an associate member of the fire protection district. ”Now, that`s gone. Now fire district volunteers receive extensive training and must have lots of dedication.”
Shay`s son Kevin can attest to that. Kevin Shay is a fire district captain and the third generation of his family to be a McHenry Township Fire Protection District volunteer.
”It`s an old myth that we just break windows and spray water inside a house to put out a fire,” he said. ”We still do that, but there`s a lot more to fighting a fire than that. All of us put in hundreds of hours of training to get our state certifications, and we do continuing education after that.” To become a state-certified firefighter, whether full time or volunteer, a person must go through 240 hours of training. McHenry`s volunteers also must receive another 130 hours of emergency medical technician training, since the department requires all volunteers to receive certifications as both firefighters and emergency medical technicians within three years of joining. Paramedics, who differ from EMTs in that they can administer drugs and read heart monitors, take another 450 hours of training on top of that.
Firefighters also can specialize in certain areas, such as underwater rescue, hazardous materials handling, rope rescue techniques or fire investigation. Each specialty requires still more training.
One of McHenry`s fire-rescue specialists is Allen Thennes, a computer analyst for Allstate Insurance when he is not on call at the fire protection district. His specialty is underwater rescue. With the Fox River, part of the Chain O`Lakes, and other bodies of water within its boundaries, McHenry has 15 certified divers, the largest dive team in McHenry County.
Because McHenry`s dive team is so large, its divers sometimes are asked to help in areas well outside the district`s boundaries.
”I`ve made one underwater recovery of a man who had a heart attack on Twin Lakes (in Wisconsin, about 14 miles north of McHenry),” Thennes said.
”We found him in about 25 feet of water. Ordinarily, Twin Lakes would have called Kenosha County (Wis.) for divers. But we have more divers, and they knew that we could get out there quickly.”
The training that Thennes and the other volunteers receive is one of the things that McHenry Fire Chief Chris Bennett, a 24-year fire protection district veteran, said he is most proud of.
”Firefighters and emergency medical services personnel on most departments are well-trained these days, but I believe we stress training as much as anybody,” he said. ”We demand a lot from people, but then what can be more gratifying than having the ability to save someone`s life?”
Randy McCafferty, a lieutenant with the neighboring Wonder Lake Fire Protection District, said McHenry sets the standard for training throughout the county. McCafferty also runs McHenry County College`s fire science program, where most McHenry County firefighters receive their initial training.
”They`re by far the biggest department around here, so they send more people through the fire science program than any other department,”
McCafferty said. ”They`re our biggest supporter.”
The college sometimes uses McHenry`s main fire station to hold some of its fire science classes.
McHenry Township Fire Protection District President Jim Althoff said those facilities are one reason the department has little trouble attracting and keeping volunteers. ”We`ve tried to develop an esprit de corps, and one way we`ve done that is to make the fire station (in McHenry) a home away from home, or maybe a club would be a better way to put it,” he said.
Another attraction is the fire district`s willingness to pay for training. Gust said the department is liberal with educational opportunities. ”Many of our firefighters go to the University of Illinois Fire Service Institute, and we pay for their lodging, food and tuition. If someone wants to go a seminar that will help them improve, they go.” Another factor is the departments busyness. ”There`s lots of diversity. We have fire calls, car accidents, ice rescues, underwater rescues and that gives us a chance to use all of our skills.”
The fire protection district has three stations, one in McHenry, a second in Johnsburg and a third in Lakemoor, east of McHenry. The McHenry station is the main one, since that`s where the fire district`s population is largest.
That station has a kitchen and lounge area with comfy sofas and chairs and a wide-screen television, an exercise and weight room, a large classroom and two televisions, and separate sleeping areas with about a half dozen beds for the men and women on the force who sometimes sleep there between calls on busy nights.
Seventeen of the firefighters are women. One of them is Linda Brady, who also teaches McHenry County College`s first-responder course, a basic emergency medical procedures course. Brady is the fire protection district`s public education coordinator as well as a firefighter and paramedic.
”I feel good knowing I`m helping people, and no matter what the nature of a call is, your blood starts pumping,” she said. ”And I really like the public education work.”
The volunteers do get paid, $14 a call, so many volunteers use the term
”paid-on-call” to describe the department. Still, there are no full-timers, as neighboring Crystal Lake, Fox Lake and many other suburan communities now have. Actually, most volunteer departments pay their firefighters small amounts per call.
All the volunteers carry beepers, and most respond to calls from their homes or businesses. Several years ago the department also decided to staff the main station with three people at a time from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day. Volunteers who work during those hours receive $7 an hour, no matter how many calls they answer.
For Brent Lane of McHenry, a fire district volunteer since 1980, being a volunteer rescue worker is almost a dream come true.
”My wife tells her friends that I`ve got a million dollars` worth of toys here at the firehouse,” Lane said. ”A lot of kids grow up wanting to be a fireman. This is like fulfilling a boyhood fantasy.”
But not in every way. The danger is real, tingeing many calls with an element of fear and uncertainty. And no matter how many hours of training a person has, he`s never sure how he will respond until he answers a real-life call.
”I can still remember the first time I drove the truck to a grass fire. My left foot was on the clutch, shaking all to hell,” Lane said.
One Friday evening began with some nervousness and uncertainty when Allen Thennes, Jay Rasmussen, Carolyn Davis and Cindy Byron responded to a rescue call for an alcohol overdose victim on Bull Valley Road, south of town. As Thennes drove the ambulance to the location, Rasmussen, Davis and Byron sat in the back and pulled on latex gloves, readied stethoscopes and blood pressure machines to record the victim`s vital signs-and discussed the possibility of trouble. ”This one is liable to be combative,” Rasmussen said. ”Sometimes the drunks aren`t real happy to see us.”
But this drunk was no threat. ”I don`t want my parents to hate me. Would someone please tell them that I love them?” implored the 16-year-old high school student, as she lay on a stretcher in the back of the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
”Your parents won`t hate you,” everyone assured her. ”The important thing,” added Davis, ”is that no one was hurt.”
A McHenry police officer had found her and three friends parked on the side of Bull Valley Road. She was very drunk and the only one old enough to drive.
It was a lucky day all around: a car full of underage drinkers and no accident and a rollover accident where the driver walked away with only a scratch. And earlier, an elderly McHenry couple escaped serious injury after a 30,000-pound trench digging machine fell off a trailer onto their car. The trencher`s blade cut through the car`s roof, just behind the front-seat headrests. McHenry`s rescue workers had to cut the couple out of the car.
”Rescue calls can be tough sometimes, especially when you lose someone,” Rasmussen said. ”But when you have someone who is in full arrest
(no heartbeat) and you bring the person back, that`s a great feeling. And it`s good to see people get lucky, as we have today.”
