KANSAS CITY, Mo. — As people in Florida are bracing for Hurricane Idalia, first responders from Kansas City are there and ready to help.
Two rescue specialists from the Kansas City Fire Department (KCFD) were deployed as part of the Missouri Task Force.
The most recent update as of Thursday morning said the Task Force is now being staged in Panama City.
KCFD Captain Tyler Grosser said the two firefighters from Kansas City will be assigned to high priority areas once crews move in after the storm. He said they’ll be put on teams with dogs and other technology to help.
“We’ve had enough of these hurricanes in recent times that we’ve had the foresight to pre-deploy the resources and have them waiting there,” he said.
He said they’ll start with water rescues before going building to building. They use as much technology as possible to assist with searches.
“If we have high suspicion of somebody being in a residence, we’ll find our way in with any means necessary,” Grosser said. “We can actually just search the perimeter of houses with dogs or use drones to identify high priority areas.”
He said they can’t leave a "single stone unturned."
“That incorporates several different times when we have to contact each and every building, and we do that using a multitude of different things,” Grosser said.
Grosser said getting deployed to disasters can range in impact, but with a storm like Idalia, they know what to expect.
“We go out to these events, we anticipate the infrastructure to be bad or nonexistent,” he said.
And he would know. He’s responded to a hurricane before. He said the silence that follows the storm, is what sticks out the most.
“It’s not really anything that’s really describable,” he said. “In these areas where you might have islands or something like that, the water goes over the entire thing. And so, when that happens, the odd thing is that there’s no living thing left. The birds are gone, the snakes are gone, anything that makes noise.”
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