LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – Nevada’s Task Force 1 is back home and debriefing after a weeks-long trip through the southeast.
Forty-six first responders from around the Las Vegas Valley were sent first to Florida and then to Tennessee to help with Hurricane Helene cleanup and recovery, and then went back down to Florida once Hurricane Milton hit.
Thirty-five more people from Clark County also went to Florida for Milton recovery.
Matthew Gordon, a team leader with Task Force 1, talked with FOX5 Monday about the deployment, and said the most impactful moments involved one-on-one interactions.
“Sometimes it’s the simple things, like truly just checking somebody’s blood pressure because they’re not feeling well, or delivering the food or the water or helping to move the debris out of their driveway just so they can get their vehicles back in and out,” Gordon said.
Some of the people the task force encountered, Gordon said, thought they were FEMA at first. Thanks to disinformation campaigns, they were skeptical of what Task Force 1 was doing there.
“Sometimes, there’s a little bit of animosity that comes into play when people hear the word FEMA,” Gordon said. “Sometimes, that is maybe not everybody’s favorite word that they want to hear.”
Eventually, Gordon says once his team got to work and helped those people, they felt welcomed.
Task Force 1 will try to learn from their experience in the southeast.
“Every deployment is different,” Gordon said. “Whatever we can do to try to make it so we‘re more prepared and better ready to do our job the next time, that’s what we want to do.”
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