FRANKLIN COUNTY, N.C. (WNCN) — For the past month, dozens of agencies and countless first responders have worked tirelessly to help with efforts in western North Carolina recovering from Hurricane Helene.
“I think everybody enters in with a servant’s heart,” said Jeremy Fryett, Deputy Director of Operations for Franklin County Emergency Management Services.
Fryett said the agency initially sent a team shortly after the storm hit to help with 911 operations in McDowell County. After five days on-site, the deputy director said he and others from Franklin County EMS followed with a second deployment.
“When you enter into a disaster area to the magnitude of what Hurricane Helene caused, it really humbles you. It personalizes all of the experiences the folks in the western portion of North Carolina have endured, and what they continue to experience every single day,” said Fryett. “If there’s only one takeaway that I’ve seen from our crews, it’s that they wanted to do more.”
Fryett said since their responders returned, some of them gathered for a debrief meeting Tuesday night. He said the team focused on their experiences, their perspectives, and how to cope from some of the tragedies they encountered.
“I think many times people view first responders in a light that they’re just supposed to be able to handle whatever they see,” said Fryett. “We are very much human beings.”
Wayne Daniels, a former Franklin County sheriff’s deputy, said the Tuesday gathering was part of a continued effort to support first responders and their mental health. It’s something Daniels began to dedicate himself to when he created the group ‘Big and Small Peer Support’ about four years ago.
Daniels not only hoped to process some of his own personal experiences in law enforcement but also noticed the growing mental health impacts from the pandemic.
“While I was working at the sheriff’s office, I was noticing some officers were holding their head down and you could tell they were feeling stress,” explained Daniels.
Daniels said the group started finding ways to support first responder agencies by cooking meals a few times during the year, delivering gratitude boxes, and offering peer-to-peer support.
“What we do is we listen to them, we give them ideas of how to cope with things, we give them resources if they need it — basically, a check-in to see how they’re doing mentally,” said Joe Amos, the Chief of Police for the Middlesex Police Department.
Amos, who is also the Treasurer for Big and Small Peer Support, said he’s hoping to change the mindset that surrounds mental health—something he said is not always talked about and often under-reported.
“When we came up, you didn’t talk about mental health, you didn’t seek help, and if you went and saw a counselor, it was pretty much the end of your career. That’s still kind of the thought today,” said Amos.
Both Amos and Daniels explained that the organization is prioritizing the mental health of those first responders who continue to return from the western part of the state. So far, they’ve organized a number of meetings and debriefings. Tuesday’s meeting also included a special visit with Franklin County EMS’s therapy dog, River.
“Up there, you’re dealing with a lot of disaster, seeing a lot of things that you normally wouldn’t see, the devastation, the large-scale death,” explained Amos. “There just has to be an outlet to get rid of what you see, the stress that you build up.”
After getting the support he needed, Daniels said he took the additional training to give back to others in a similar way. He said their team is available 24 hours a day, and ready to respond if needed.
Daniels added, “As a first responder, we always want to help, we want to feel like we’re needed. So many people feel like I want to do more, I want to do more, do more, do more… and they don’t realize that they have done a lot.”
Learn more about Big and Small Peer Support here.