Blue Jackets, Werenski to host Ohio Task Force 1 for First Responders Night

A month ago, many in Ohio looked on in disbelief and sadness as Hurricanes Helene and Milton swept through the southeastern United States, leaving massive devastation in thousands of communities.

But there was also a group from the Buckeye State whose duty it is to help in such a situation. Ohio Task Force 1 is one of 28 Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) teams that function within the National US&R Response System managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Headquartered in Dayton and staffed by first responders from around Ohio, it’s their job to respond to disasters around the country and lend a helping hand in a time of need.

The 82-member deployment squad – which will have members in Zach Werenski's charitable suite at the Blue Jackets’ First Responders Night game presented by Jet’s Pizza on Friday night – spent 21 days in Florida and North Carolina assisting local authorities and residents to respond to the storms and get back on their feet as quickly as possible.

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“If you impact one person’s life on a deployment, then I look at it as a successful mission,” said Jeff Newman, the leader of Ohio Task Force 1. “In both events at different times, we would actually have people come up to us and just thank us for our service. We had a lot of prayer circles with people and things like that. And those are the good stories we can come back with.

“If you look at it almost like it’s a grieving process, this is another step in that, and we’re able to talk to them and just give them some kind of hope. We’re there to help them in the recovery process as much as possible and get that closure for people so they can move on and start the rebuilding process.”

The captain of the Sycamore Township Fire Department near Cincinnati, Newman said he’s been on more than 20 such missions since joining Ohio Task Force 1 in 2002, but this deployment was the longest the group has ever been on because there were two major storms back-to-back that devastated communities.

The unit takes all of its own equipment, rations and bedding for each trip so as not to provide any burden on the already stressed areas they’re serving. Their primary jobs are performing search and rescue events at structural collapses as well as performing water rescues as storm surges rise, and they did both duties at different times on their deployment.

They were first called into action in Pasco County, Florida, just north of the Tampa/St. Petersburg area. When Hurricane Helene came ashore in late September, the unprecedented level of storm surge meant local authorities had to perform more than 600 water rescues, and Ohio Task Force 1 was there to help the cause.

When the water receded, authorities including OTF1 went into search and rescue mode, sweeping through 24 square miles and checking around 20,000 structures.

“There was water in places they had never in the history of the county had water inundation,” Newman said.

From there, members of the unit traveled to Cherokee, North Carolina, to help local authorities after the rainfall from Helene caused unprecedented levels of flooding in the western part of the state. Ohio Task Force 1 assisted in rescue and recovery missions in Haywood, Avery and Watauga Counties.

“There were people washed 16 miles down from where they originally lived in the floods,” Newman said. “I had never witnessed the power of water and what it had left before in my life. There were 30-yard dumpsters down in the creeks. The product that was down in there and the trees and everything else up in the dams and up against bridges and stuff like that. We had to search all those debris piles.”

Once the duties were completed in North Carolina, the unit was called back to Florida to help with the response to Hurricane Milton, which ripped across the Sunshine State just days after Helene made landfall. Ohio Task Force 1 was sent to Fort Pierce on the eastern shore of the state, where a series of tornadoes that were part of Milton left a path of destruction.

“There was a long track F3 tornado that went 27 miles, and it was crisscrossed by an F1, and that crisscross was directly over the sheriff’s department and a 300-home modular home park that was there,” Newman said. “It did a lot of damage, so we spent that whole next day searching all those structures with our dogs and everything else and looking for trapped people.”

Eventually, the group was able to head home, where they returned to their day jobs, but you never know when the call to duty will come again. The unit has 210 members, mostly first responders throughout the state who have experience in the types of emergency management situations that are required in disaster relief.

Several of them will be at Nationwide Arena on Friday night, including Newman, while Jet’s Pizza will host guests from the Madison Township Fire Station and Central & Southern Ohio Red Cross at the game. The fire station initiated a community-wide donation drive to support hurricane victims, resulting in an extraordinary outpouring of generosity with over 40,000 pounds of relief supplies, including nonperishable food, bottled water, and baby formula collected.

The chance to be recognized by the Blue Jackets will be appreciated as another sign of a job well done.

“My job as a leader is to bring the team up to the forefront so people understand when they see us or they hear us, they understand what we’re doing,” Newman said. “We really do appreciate the recognition – not that we need it. That’s not at all what we do this for, but it’s good for people to understand what we do.”