Debriefing Team Helps Ease Stress From Traumatic Encounters : Counseling: Anaheim, Garden Grove and Orange fire departments encourage firefighters who witness gruesome scenes to talk about the events.

Although firefighters frequently encounter gruesome scenes at fires and traffic accidents, some incidents etch themselves more deeply than normal into the minds of rescue workers.

A mangled boy who dies soon after being pulled from a flattened car may remind a firefighter of his own son. Or, on a larger scale, a firefighter might die after falling through a burning roof, sending a pall over an entire department.

To help ease the stress and anxiety created by traumatic incidents, three North County fire departments have formed a specially trained debriefing team of firefighters. The team, which operates 24 hours a day, travels to accident scenes or fire stations to give firefighters a chance to talk about what happened.

The team swung into action after one case last January when Anaheim firefighters responded to a call where a man had been jolted by 8,000 volts of electricity after the aluminum extension pole he had been using to paint the side of a warehouse brushed a power line.

When firefighters arrived at the east Anaheim warehouse, the 31-year-old Riverside man lay on the roof of the building, his clothes in flames. He was conscious, but muscle spasms had pulled his body into a fetal position and he was struggling to pat out the flames. The victim suffered severe burns and spent the next seven months in the hospital.

“I can guarantee you the people attending that (call) won’t forget it,” said Ron Hamric, Anaheim division fire chief. “Those kinds of incidents plant themselves firmly in your head. It’s hard to shake them. You can go out on several more incidents afterward, but that one’s still in your head.”

Members of the critical-incident stress debriefing team, who are volunteers from the ranks of the Anaheim, Garden Grove and Orange fire departments, met with the firefighters at the station to talk about the event. Simply talking about traumatic events goes a long way toward reducing emotional strain and job burnout, psychologists say.

The Orange County team has been called in to counsel firefighters several times since its inception last year. The team is one of about 140 across the nation using a debriefing method developed by Jeffrey T. Mitchell, a Maryland paramedic-turned-psychologist.

Orange County’s program began with the help of Anaheim Memorial Hospital, which agreed to fund the program for two years to get it started.

Jennifer Lawrence, an exercise physiologist in the hospital’s cardiac rehabilitation unit and the team’s coordinator, said she saw a need for a stress-reduction program after seeing a high number of emergency service workers in the unit.

She discussed forming a critical-incident stress program with hospital management and the Anaheim Fire Department. Both thought it was a good idea, she said. Garden Grove and Orange joined because they had been working with Anaheim on developing a joint stress-management program.

“We should have had this years ago,” said Capt. Al Edwards, Garden Grove’s training officer. “It’s helping, especially with the paramedics. We do have a burnout problem with them.”

Once the program gets running smoothly, Lawrence said, the three departments will ask other Orange County departments to join by providing volunteers to be trained as counselors. A larger team helps because it works best to have peer counselors who aren’t co-workers of the firefighters being debriefed, she said.

Fire departments have traditionally offered psychological counseling for employees requesting it, Mitchell said. But more departments are adding a less-threatening version, allowing stress debriefings to be conducted by fellow firefighters who have gone through similar rescues and understand the feelings.

The 34 Orange County “peer counselors” that have volunteered from the three fire departments have been trained to conduct debriefings that allow rescue workers to vent their stress.

Firefighters and paramedics already talk about particularly gruesome incidents and often crack jokes to relieve stress, said James Bradley, an Anaheim paramedic and one of the peer counselors.

“Critical-incident stress debriefing is an expansion of that,” Bradley said. “It’s just a little more formal and a little more guided.”

The crew is asked to talk about what happened, what they saw, how they reacted to it and how they felt about it.

The debriefings are offered strictly for the benefit of emergency personnel, Hamric said. Nothing is recorded in personnel files and firefighters are not required to participate.

To maintain confidentiality, the only people allowed to attend the stress debriefings are the firefighters who were on the scene, one or two peer counselors who were uninvolved in the incident and a psychologist who specializes in helping emergency service workers.

People who talk about a traumatic incident recover from it faster, said Mitchell, co-founder of the American Critical Incident Stress Foundation in Ellicott City, Md. Holding a debriefing soon after a traumatic event helps the emergency worker look at it more realistically.

“We want to get to the individual before the person has had the time to rethink the event and make it more horrible than it was,” Mitchell said.

When confronted by a major trauma or even many smaller ones over a long period of time, some emergency workers start thinking about the events over and over, blaming themselves for things they thought they should have been able to do, Mitchell said.

The problem, called post-traumatic stress disorder, affects their jobs, their personal relationships and other facets of life, Mitchell said.

The first critical-incident team in the country began in New Jersey in January, 1983, Mitchell said. It formed one year after Air Florida Flight 90 plunged into the icy Potomac River in Washington shortly after takeoff, killing 78 people.

An informal network of the counseling teams already exists in the state. The Los Angeles County critical-incident team, the first in California, was called to San Francisco last October to talk to rescue workers after the Bay Area earthquake, Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Garry Oversby said.

“I’m convinced the program works,” said Oversby, a volunteer peer counselor. “It’s nice when a firefighter comes up to me afterword and says, ‘Boy that really helped. I feel better about this.’ ”