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Students in Roane State’s Emergency Medical Technician B Program are pictured with some of the items they gathered to help victims of Hurricane Florence.
Oct. 10, 2018
By Bob Fowler
Roane State staff
Driven to help others, Roane State Community College students enthusiastically rose to the occasion.
The 17 students in the Emergency Medical Technician night class collected about 20,000 pounds of water, pet food, toiletry items and cleaning supplies for victims of Hurricane Florence, Jason Fox said.
Fox, an adjunct faculty member who teaches the three-night-a-week course at Roane State’s Knox County Center for Health Sciences, said the students rounded up the items in eight days.
“I try to teach the students to get involved in community outreach and give back,” Fox said. “Doing patient care is just a small part of being a healthcare provider.”
Fox said at the start of this semester’s Emergency Medical Technician B Program, he told students the benefits of doing community service as a way of promoting the work done by Emergency Medical Services providers.
As Hurricane Florence strengthened and approached North Carolina, Fox said he “kind of dropped some clues, and all the light bulbs went off with the students.”
Students started brainstorming ways to help those hit by the storm. “They went active with their plan on Sept. 12,” Fox said, or two days before the hurricane made landfall.
The class was divided until four squads for some friendly competition to see which group could collect the most hurricane relief items between Sept. 12 and Sept. 20. Students were able to receive donations from family, friends and businesses around the area, Fox said.
Fox and two friends from Morristown drove three trailers full of donations to North Carolina on Sept. 21, dropping the items off in Conway, N.C.
What is normally a six- to seven-hour drive took 14 hours because of flooding. The deluge “made it almost impossible to get to the coast itself,” Fox said.
“There was a lot of devastation, a lot more than most people think,” he said. Hotels deep inside North Carolina were full of residents displaced by the storm.
On their return to East Tennessee, Fox and his two volunteers managed to find a hotel with rooms for them about 4 a.m. Sept. 22. The location was ironic: Florence, N.C.
The students have also organized a drive with Medic Regional Blood Center to solicit blood donations at Roane State’s Knox County campus, 132 Hayfield Road, on Nov. 1, Fox said.
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