Here - and there - when we need him

By Darrell Laurant

Published: October 3, 2008

Ricky Bomar is a disaster waiting to happen.

Wait — that didn’t sound right. He’s waiting for a disaster to happen.

But not eagerly. A career firefighter/paramedic with the Lynchburg Fire Department, Bomar is clearly a compassionate man who wouldn’t want to see anyone hurt. On the other hand, as part of the Virginia Disaster Medical Assistance Team, he looks forward to opportunities to put his training into practice.

“We were deployed at the Democratic Convention in Denver,” said Bomar, one of only two local members of what he calls Virginia DMAT, “and didn’t really have to do anything. That was good news. The important thing was, we were there if they needed us.”

By contrast, the next assignment put Bomar in touch with people who needed him and his team very much. First, though, there was a little shuffling to be done, as Hurricane Ike wandered out in the Gulf of Mexico like a menacing drunk.

“At the beginning, we were going to go to Puerto Rico, because that was supposed to take a direct hit,” Bomar said. “Then, they sent us to Atlanta as a sort of staging area, figuring that they could deploy us almost anywhere in the Southeast from there. There was some talk about Florida, I believe Tallahassee, and then we were sent to Baton Rouge to live in a tent city on the banks of the Mississippi. All of this was because the hurricane kept shifting.”

As Ike finally zeroed in on the Texas/Louisiana coast, the Virginia team was evacuated to a hurricane-secure shelter at the Lousiana State University’s agriculture station north of Baton Rouge.

“There, we took care of 150 people with special needs, mostly elderly,” Bomar said. “A lot of them just came with the clothes on their back, and most were being cared for at home. They needed oxygen, medication, all of that. We worked 12-hour shifts for a few days.”

For Ricky Bomar, this is all over and above his daily routine in Lynchburg. Virginia DMAT, one of 100 such teams in the U.S., is a sort of all-star team of emergency personnel, which is used to augment local medical care in the event of something too big for that locality to handle.

“September 11 would be one example, of course,” Bomar said.

His DMAT team wasn’t there, though, because it hadn’t been formed yet. It’s a relatively new concept, started in 2004 beneath the umbrella of the Department of Health and Human Services, and Bomar had to work hard to get aboard.

“The Virginia team is based in York County,” he said, “and I knew some of the guys on it, and they recommended me. The problem was, they had a rule that members had to live within three hours of York County, and for me it was more like four. Then, finally, they extended that out to include me.

“After that, I had to wait a year to get my federal approval. I don’t know why it takes so long.”

A lot of little kids want to be firemen. For Bomar, it was almost pre-ordained.

“My father used to run Bomar’s Market, which was right near one of the fire stations,” Bomar said, “and I hung around the firehouse all the time. They took me in, although they had to hide me or send me home whenever their bosses came by, because they didn’t want kids in the fire station.”

His first “adult” job, he said, “was painting lines on a parking lot. That didn’t last too long, and then I joined the fire department.”

He took his initial paramedic class in 1983 and been furthering his education ever since.

“You never stop,” he said. “It’s always something.”

As anyone who has been scared by the mass media knows, the range of conflagrations that can occur at any time in America is enough to make you hunker down in your bedroom. Of course, as the recent pipeline explosion in Appomattox County demonstrated quite graphically, that doesn’t always help, either.

“We have medical technicians on our team, haz-mat specialists, a little bit of everything,” Bomar said, “and we train once a month. This year, we offered support to the Langley Air Show as a way of practicing.”

DMAT teams typically consist of 35 members, all of whom must not only meet strict qualification standards, but must be approved by other team members. Teams are on call for a month at a time — which is Bomar’s case is October.

“We miss him when he’s gone,” said Lynchburg fire Chief Brad Ferguson, “but we’re glad to let him do it. Sometimes, he brings information back that we can use.”

Ironically, if there were a plane crash or tornado or some other disaster in Central Virginia, Bomar probably wouldn’t be involved as a DMAT team member.

“I’d be doing my regular job, then,” he said. “We’d get a team from somewhere else to help us.”