Fanwood Rescue Squad Takes Second at Competition

Members of the showed off their skills Saturday at a Youth EMT Contest, taking second place out of four squads. The competition challenged each squad with different emergency scenarios, judging the groups' responses to each situation. Karolyn Buckridee, Elizabeth Buckridee, Joseph Kaiser and Robert Villegas, the Fanwood Rescue Squad's youngest members, made up the team at Saturday's competition.

The Fanwood team finished 2.5 points behind Hopatcong, the day's winner. Teams from Chatham and the Tri-Borough First Aid Squad, which covers Butler, Bloomingdale and Kinnelon, also competed. The Patriots' Path Boy Scouts Council sponsored the competition for EMTs ages 16 to 20, which was held at Atlantic Healthcare's headquarters in Morristown.

"It was like one big EMT test," Kaiser said, describing the experience of the competition, which he said had four different rounds, with four different scenarios for the team to tackle, such as a man who refuses to surrender his ring to a mugger and gets his finger cut off. "For never doing something like that [competition], I thought we did very well," Kaiser said.

The team was accompanied by Nancy Mustachio, Vice President of the Fanwood Rescue Squad and Patty Buckridee, the squad's Sergeant. "They really handled themselves well," Mustachio said. "I'm extremely proud of them."

"It's exciting to work with people your own age and compete with people your own age," said Kaiser, who is 19. Most of his experience working with the Fanwood Rescue Squad is with people considerably older than he is, he said. Villegas also appreciated the youthful atmosphere of the competition. "It was good to see that other squads have kids our age," Villegas said.

"They're really the only youth members we have, and they are also really good EMTs," Buckridee said. She said she would like the competition to be publicized more in the future, to give an opportunity for more young EMTs to practice their skills. In addition to the amputated finger, the emergency scenarios at the competition also included a motor vehicle accident victim, a victim of a fall, and child found non-responsive in a pool. Buckridee's daughter Karolyn was chosen by her teammates to act as crew chief at the competition. She has been elected Sergeant of the Fanwood Rescue Squad for 2011.

Saturday's competition wasn't the only recognition the Fanwood Rescue Squad has received recently. Last month it received a nomination for Outstanding Volunteer EMS Agency for 2010 by the New Jersey Office of Emergency Medical Services.

Though Fanwood's youth team didn't come in first place, Mustachio said she heard a comment about the group that was even better. "One of the judges said, 'Hey, if I'm sick, I want to be in Fanwood.' I thought, that's a winner."

 Editor's Note: Alan Neuhauser is a member of the Fanwood Rescue Squad.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the Chatham Emergency Squad took first place. It was the Hopatcong Ambulance Squad that won the competition, not Chatham.