Brookfield Fire Capt. Nick Cresanto explains how smoke and flames move through a home at the junior fire academy. Cresanto, whose son, Liam, is to his right, recently helped staff a temporary hospital in North Carolina.
When Hurricane Helene hit the southeastern United States and North Carolina declared a state of emergency, the state asked the federal government for help.
Brookfield Fire Capt. Nick Cresanto was one of many who answered the call.
Cresanto is a member of two Pennsylvania-based Disaster Medical Assistance Teams created under the umbrella of the Department of Health and Human Services. The teams include doctors, nurses and paramedics from Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and West Virginia. Cresanto was deployed with a team Oct. 4-17.
“Basically, we operate like a field hospital, like M*A*S*H,” Cresanto said, referring to the army’s mobile surgical hospitals made famous by the movie and TV show of the same name.
“Anytime there is a need, like a hospital system gets interrupted or damaged or there is an influx of patients the hospital can’t handle, we can go in and set up our own hospital,” he said.
Working mostly out of tents, Cresanto’s team provided emergency care for injuries and illnesses related to the hurricane, but also for more routine ailments you’d expect an ER to deal with. They saw people who had been cut by chainsaws, had been injured by falling trees and who had lost their medication when their homes were destroyed. He got to hear stories of what his patients had gone through.
“Sometimes, you just need to lend an ear,” he said.
Brookfield Fire Capt. Nick Cresanto
The team operated in Asheville and Mill Spring, which sustained heavy flooding from Hurricane Helene. In Asheville, the team supplemented a large hospital that had lost water service and was operating at about 25 percent of its capacity.
The team was “mildly busy,” Cresanto said. “It wasn’t like crazy busy, it wasn’t slow, just steady flow all day.”
“This was my first disaster deployment,” Cresanto said. “I did do other deployments but they were more national events and things like that. I did a couple trainings with the team, setting up tents and things like that, but then, to see the whole thing come together and actually do what we were supposed to do, it was impressive. Learned a lot of things.”
Most of the team’s meetings and training sessions are held virtually, so he had only met two of the about 15 members on his team in person before. The lack of familiarity among team members did not get in the way of how the team functioned.
“We got there, did a quick training and started meshing,” he said. “In my opinion, we rocked it.”
The team was mostly limited to its site and the members slept in tents, but Cresanto said he got to see the devastation caused by the storm on his way in and out. In the arts section of Asheville, he saw foundations of buildings that had been washed away, cars wrapped around bridge abutments, mudslide scars and debris piles.
“There was absolute, catastrophic devastation down through there,” he said.
Cresanto said it was rewarding to be able to use the skills and experiences he had accumulated over the years in this setting.
“It was good to be there,” he said. “I’m excited to go to another one, if the need arises.”
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