BEVERLY, MASS. (WHDH) - MA Task Force 1 is officially back in the Bay State Wednesday.
The team of 46 team members and three K9s had been in Florida, helping provide resources and conduct search and rescue missions in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.
“You’d see cars overturned, so we had to search cars, vehicles, homes,” Anita Arnum, leader of the task force, said. “It’s like a war zone.”
Another member said while the disaster wasn’t the first they had seen, “this was on a scale that was, I’ve never seen anything like it,”
The team also came across people who had ridden out the storm.
“There was one person in particular that was held up in a hotel,” Mike Valkanas, a physician on the team, said. “They had a foot injury, so we had to get him to local EMS.”
“They were very resilient,” Arnum said. “We had encounters with some people who didn’t want to leave until their neighbors were able to get evacuated.”
“One couple actually explained that while they were sitting there all of the vehicles under the parking area were slamming off the floor. And they realized that they had made a poor decision,” Lt. Matt Mullen of the Natick Fire Department said.
Arnum was happy with the way the team handled every situation.
“They did a fantastic job, they work very well together, like a well-oiled machine,” she said.
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