2020_06_Blues_Final_Reduced

AT THE READY Hudson County EMS coordinator Mike McCabe, left, and John Grembowiec, chairman of the state’s EMS Task Force, survey the
army of ambulances from around the country that assembled at the Meadowlands Racetrack in East Rutherford during the Covid-19 outbreak.
responded, reported that 640 EMS personnel
had tested positive for Covid-19;
13 died from it. According to the Office of
the Attorney General, 495 New Jersey law
enforcement officers tested positive; eight
died. And according to a Division of Fire
Safety survey, to which about two-thirds
of the state’s fire departments responded,
190 firefighters tested positive; four died.
Anyone who doubts the severity of the
virus outbreak that has paralyzed New Jersey
needs only talk to the first responders
who have seen it up close and who reach for
the grimmest language when describing it.
“Like a war zone,” says Michelle Idler, a
senior paramedic at University Hospital.
“We’re in doomsday scenario,” says Billy
Vanides, another senior paramedic at University.
“This is nothing like we’ve ever seen.”
“I’ve probably seen more death in the last
three weeks than I did in my whole career,”
says North Bergen EMS Chief Dave Prina.
“There’s just so much tragedy that these
first responders are seeing on a daily basis
it’s tough to even comprehend,” says Mike
McCabe, chief of operations for McCabe
Ambulance in Bayonne, EMS coordinator
for the Hudson County office of Emergency
Management and the North leader of the
New Jersey EMS Task Force.
“A prolonged emergency,” says Deputy
Chief Larry Cattano of the Perth Amboy
police department.
The virus is inescapable, upending first
responders’ jobs and threatening their
health and safety wherever they go. “This
officer was just doing what he was supposed
to do, got called because this guy
decided to assault his wife,” Cattano says
about a domestic-violence call during
which a Perth Amboy officer was spat on
by a man who said he had the coronavirus.
The state attorney general’s office took over
prosecution of that case and several similar
ones, upgrading the charges to terroristic
threats during a state of emergency (2nd
degree). The officer was quarantined and
returned to duty after he tested negative.
“He’s just there doing his job, and he needs
this extra thing thrown upon him—the
thought of, Am I infecting my family now?”
In Jersey City, some new fire-academy
graduates found themselves on virus duty
before they were even sworn in, helping
people who lined up at the city’s coronavirous
testing center at fire department headquarters.
“It’s kind of what we signed up for
as firefighters, to help other people,” says
T.J. Cleary, who is following three uncles
and two cousins into the department.
“Some of them were really bad off to
where they couldn’t stand, couldn’t talk—
something I didn’t expect at all,” says Khalil
Jackson, who has wanted to become a firefighter
since he was four, riding in the back
seat of his grandmother’s car, asking her to
follow the sirens to a fire.
After three weeks at the testing site, they
were assigned to fire stations, and at 12:33
am on their first night, an alarm came in: a
two-family house on Cator Avenue. They
helped contain the smoky fire to two rooms
on the first floor; nobody was injured. “So my
first day on, I had my first fire,” Jackson says.
Streets everywhere have been emptier
during the lockdown. Traffic was flowing
easily on what is usually the clogged artery
of Communipaw Avenue in the section
of Jersey City that police officers Shane
O’Brien and Dylan Solt patrol on the evening
shift. “There are people out, but we’re just
JUNE 2020 NEW JERSEY MONTHLY 41