Running Towards Disaster | Ep. 4: ‘That first 24 is on us’

Krystal Shuler: I don’t expect when I’m driving uphill to run into ponds of water so, yeah, that one was different. As you’re driving and you see entire single wide trailers or vehicles floating by until they hit a structure, and they either take said structure out, bridges and stuff, or they just crumble into a million pieces and get sucked on down and they just keep going.

Caroline Parker: Welcome back to “Running Towards Disaster,” a series of stories from people who in times of crisis, head towards it to help. I’m Caroline Parker with EdNC.  

You just heard from Krystal Shuler. She’s a paramedic and the emergency medical services program coordinator at Haywood Community College. She’s worked for the college as an instructor for 15 years and has been in EMS for 21. But a career in education wasn’t always part of the plan. When she was a student at Southwestern Community College, an instructor nudged her to give it a try. 

Krystal Shuler: I really got to where I love the education side. I love seeing the light bulb click in students’ heads. And I enjoy the fact that I still work in the field, so I am preparing – one, my next employee, but I am preparing them because I know what they’re going to see every day, and they have to be bomb proof when they walk out there. So you have to repetitively train them on the exact same call over and over and over again. So when they walk out there, even if their brain hasn’t had time to catch up, their muscle memory will take over.

Caroline Parker: And in the spirit of educating, I asked our instructor Krystal to break down some of the jobs in emergency medical services.

Krystal Shuler: So I am a paramedic, but you start out as an EMT basic, and that gets you in the door. Then you have two more levels, where as an EMT basic, you can drive ambulances, give certain medications. 

You have that to be on a fire department, a first responder, and all those things. You can be an advanced EMT, which allows you to do innovations of patients, take over their airways, and gives you the ability to push some more drugs, start IV access. When you get to the top level of being a paramedic, then you have the ability to play in the world of having narcotics, paralyzing people, and taking their airway if they cannot manage that anymore, and basically making the field decisions for patients long-term care.  

So EMT is a 300-hour class when you get into paramedic, then you are looking at at least 1,000 hours of school. Clinicals on top of that inside of a hospital and on ambulances, and you are the decision maker.

Caroline Parker: You can see, Krystal is a very good instructor. And as fate would have it — her staff and her students in Haywood have had a lot of opportunities to practice what she teaches in school. 

Haywood County has 13 peaks above 6,000 feet, and the Pigeon River runs right through the county. All water in Haywood originates in Haywood, meaning the point where water begins to flow is geographically within the county lines. 

We’ve heard it over and over again, but natural disasters we used to call “100 year storms” are happening closer together. 

This community has seen the power of water before, and recently. In 2021, Tropical Depression Fred ripped through the area, causing major flooding and killing multiple people. The county also experienced flooding from back-to-back hurricanes in 2004.

In this episode, you’ll hear from Cade Parkins and Thomas Bates, both instructors and former students at Haywood Community College. You’ll also hear again from Krystal. All three were on shift during the storm, watching the flood waters rise and working to serve others.

They are on the other end of the line when you dial 911,and are behind the wheel of an ambulance, heading where help is needed. 

We are thankful for their stories and the community college system they represent. First up is Cade.

Cade Parkins: Once I graduated early college, my senior year of early college, I went and got my EMT. About three years later, I went and got my intermediate and then about three years after that, I went and got my paramedic. Went through the fire school here, got my fire certification, went through the basic telecommunicator training. I also work as a 911 dispatcher part time, and now I’m currently enrolled at Western getting my bachelor’s degrees in criminal justice and emergency and disaster management. 

I’d always wanted to go into public safety since I was real young. I always wanted to be a cop or a highway patrolman, but growing up I knew some people on the fire department and I could start it as as a junior. So I actually joined the fire department right at the end of age 16. So I started that, and I really found that it was a good way to give back to my community, found out that I loved it, and been in the fire service ever since, and branched out from the fire service into dispatching, and now I teach EMS here at the college. I’ve really found that it’s my way to give back to the community.

The day the flood happened, I just worked off at Maggie Fire Department and actually spent the day of the flood working in the 911 center. Taking calls, sending resources. I actually worked one of the fire channels for Waynesville Fire Department. We would take the emergency calls, we would triage them or prioritize them, and then we would send the units out to assist them.

Whenever I went into the morning, it was kind of the beginning of the flood, and then probably about an hour or two after I got there, we completely lost internet. The county cell system pretty much went down. But at that point, we were getting 911 calls off the hook, essentially.

We’d done a bunch of welfare checks. People would call in. We’d have to go check on people, make sure they got out, go assess landslides. We’ve done a few rope rescues, because some roads were inaccessible to people, so we’d have to find other means to get them out.  

I think there wasn’t necessarily a story that surprised me, but I think it was the amount of incidents that happened all at once. I mean, you’ll get a swift water rescue incident every now and again. But to have 20 or 30 happen at one time is a little unheard of for the county, especially. But, I mean, you’ll get landslides, but we were getting landslides into houses. We were getting landslides across roadways. So I think the big thing that happened out of this was the actual quantity of incidents that were all happening at once.

For my time that I’ve been here, this is probably the first time that I’ve actually seen a whole county-wide flood happen in Haywood County.

Going back to answering calls at the 911 center, I mean, you would take calls of the interstate starting to crumble and and just to look at the destruction that happened down at the interstate. I mean luckily, IMAP and highway patrol was able to get those people to safety, but I never thought that I would see an entire interstate get washed away in Haywood County, especially after something like this.

I think it, if you really look at it, it kind of humbles you to know the power of Mother Nature and and not only that, but it also shows you the power of a community coming together. I mean, if you think back to Hurricane Fred or Tropical Storm Fred, we all come together for that. All helped each other out. And like I said, Fred was more of centralized towards the east end, but Helene was very much so a county-wide response. And it really showed me that in times of crisis, that we can all come together, put any differences we have aside and really come to support our community.

Thomas Bates: My name is Thomas Bates. My position here is a lead adjunct instructor. I mainly teach the EMT classes, where I am a lead. I also adjunct instruct for our advanced EMT and our paramedic classes.

I worked the previous flood three years ago. I was working that also. I was expecting that level of flood, which was absolutely not what we got. We were at the base, my partner and I, Michaela Butler, and we were outside, and we were just kind of surveying everything.

And we could hear trees falling and snapping, and we started to see a small canal of sorts. It’s was going to cut our path off from the rest of Canton if we didn’t leave our base. So we ended up leaving our base and going up the hill to Ingles, which was the highest place we could get to right there. And it was safe. And if anybody else, you know, was retreating we were obviously in a big, giant ambulance, you know, if anybody needed help we were good. 

The communication situation that had happened, which was probably the biggest stress for me, because in this business, it’s communication. I have communication from my superiors, my supervisors, etc., and then we have communication from dispatch. When we lost cell phone and when we los, our way to communicate through the truck — it was a little, all right, we’re in pretty deep now, we got a real situation.

It’s part of being an EMS is we evaluate every situation, and then we look at the worst possible thing that could happen, no matter if it’s going to dinner. The best possible thing is we eat dinner. What’s the worst possible thing that could happen in this? How are we going to mitigate this? What can we do to make this event not as bad as it could be?

We had just lived through that flood three years earlier, and that came somewhat as a bit of a surprise. This one did not. We knew we were getting rain days before we knew this hurricane was coming, and piling it on. And we did a good job of preparation. You have to be prepared.

We knew that it was coming, so get everything out, make sure it’s all ready. And I think we did a good job of that. Whether it was emergency management, EMS, fire departments, rescue squads — we all got everything ready. We were prepared. We had our men. We knew what we needed to do, and we just got out there and we accomplished those goals.

Krystal Shuler: So my Sept. 28 started off as a shift where we knew that there was a good chance that we were going to flood. So I was the supervisor for Haywood County EMS, and on my shift, I have a large portion of the paramedics that work on my shift came out of our program. So we started our day off knowing that it was going to get hectic and communications was obviously going to be a problem because we’ve had flooding in our area before. 

But when this flood hit and came in, like it took down all of our communications. 

We lose radio frequently with floods, but we lost cell phone service, the whole nine yards this time, which has never been a thing in the past. So we went to the old ‘Hey, everybody’s going to meet here. We’re going to have to run out of here. And then you will get your assignment in person, and you’ll go to that call and you’ll come back until we could get where the radios were up enough for us to be able to communicate backwards and forth.’ 

So I had trucks in areas like Cruso that were cut off and could not get to me. We had like, our EOC center, it was surrounded by water at one point. Couldn’t get in or out of there. We couldn’t get in and out of where our actual major supply area is at our main base. We had to wait for the water to recede to be able to go restock. So we basically staged in different parts of the community and ran on fire departments.

So we were checking on approximately 100 to 150 a day that we could clear off of the missing persons list. And we did a total of, if I’m not mistaken, right around 1,500 in two weeks, of locations.

We prepare for disasters. We literally have a day where we run nothing but scenarios for 18 hours straight with a paramedic class towards the end, where it’s a day in the life of. And every horrible call that or challenging call that I have had in 21 years, they get in 18 hours. So if they can live through that, then they’re prepared to go out into the real world. But you get in the mindset when you’re a paramedic of being prepared for a disaster every day you go to work.

If there’s a disaster down east, then we deploy east. If there’s a disaster, in the western end of the state, the east comes to us. We take care of the state of North Carolina. There will be another disaster, some version of a disaster will happen, and having plenty of trained, educated, ready to go responders will make all the difference because you can bring in outside sources all day long to relieve those responders, but that first 24 is on us.

You won’t get outside sources. You don’t know a disaster is going to happen, so you have to plan like the first 24 is for you to deal with.

Caroline Parker: You’ve just listened to Cade, Thomas, and Krystal — three EMS professionals and educators who teach at Haywood Community College. They aren’t just ready when the flood waters rise and recede, but are here all the time – educating, serving, and saving.

This is the fourth episode in our series, “Running Towards Disaster” from EdNC. 

In our next episode, we take to the skies, visiting Mountain Area Medical Airlift or MAMA for short, and one of the flight paramedics that mans it. 

This was a production by me, Caroline Parker, for EdNC. EdNC was established to be an independent source of news – providing data, and analysis about education for the people of North Carolina. In short, we tell the stories happening in our state’s classrooms and involving our state’s students. Music in this series is from the talented locals in Haywood, recorded at their Friday night event, Pickin’ in the Park. For a full bibliography of this episode and all of our coverage, go to EdNC.org.