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Every commanding officer knows the value and importance of pre-planning for major incidents. But how many take the time to pre-plan for the mental well-being of their crews?
“We recommend that the care for your people needs to start long before the incident.” That’s the advice of Dodie Gill, who is the Director of the Arlington County (Va.) Employee Assistance Program, or EAP. She’s been on the job for a number of years, and had an EAP for firefighters in place a good three to four years before 9/11 hit. That pre-planning played a critical role in the care dispensed to the firefighters who responded to the attack on the Pentagon.
“In the year prior to 9/11,” Gill recalls, “Arlington Captain Bob Gray did four hours of mandatory training for personnel, to identify what PTSD is, what stress looks like, etc. When the plane went in, we [the EAP staff] went to the nearest fire station, and were immediately deployed to the Pentagon.”
Gill says that she and her staff were on site at the Pentagon “24/7, for 12 days straight,” after the attack.
“We created shifts, got debriefed, and were immersed for the first three days,” she says. “We started the day at 7 a.m. with a staff debriefing; at 8 o’clock we were in the EOC [Emergency Operations Center]; by 10 a.m. we were back at the Pentagon.”
Gill, who is a Licensed Professional Counselor, Licensed Substance Abuse Treatment Practitioner, and Certified Employee Assistance Professional, says that it’s important to establish ties with your people before help is actually needed. “The relationship-building process is very important,” she notes. “For example, I had dinner with the firefighters at their firehouses, and practiced doing live burns with them,” she says. Gill believes that by learning what their lives are like and developing that special relationship helped the firefighters open up to her later when they were under duress.
Gill now finds that the work her agency did is being studied as a template in other communities across the nation. For its efforts, the Arlington EAP was also awarded a SAMHSA (Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration) grant, the only one given outside of New York state in the wake of 9/11. With it, Gill was able to “double my staff; and hire a diverse group of professionals to expand the program.”
Working with the firefighters, Gill concedes, “has been one of the most remarkable experiences of my life.”
Written by Rory Thompson
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