Beyond Philadelphia - The Papal Visit
by John Gillespie, EMSCI #230
Radnor (PA) Fire Company
While not in the thick of the event itself, the months of preparation did not skip the agencies surrounding the City of Philadelphia. Radnor Fire & Ambulance, located 13 miles west of Philly, was one of many affected by the week-long activities. The World Meeting of Families (WMF) and its organizers encouraged people to use public transportation, especially since large areas of the city were affected by travel and vehicle restrictions.
SEPTA (South Eastern Public Transit Authority) – the region’s public transportation network of trains, buses, and trolleys – limited the number of stations that would service the city during the weekend of the Pope’s visit, and Radnor was the township in the entire region that got tasked with two of these stations: one for the regional rail train system and one for the high speed trolley. SEPTA was selling advance tickets for each station in the area of 10,000 per day per station.
With the gridlock caused by people coming to park for the stations and with the main artery (I-76) into the City of Philadelphia being closed to traffic, we anticipated that Radnor was going to become a giant parking lot and we determined that the one of the only methods of response was going to be our bike teams.
Radnor Fire Company (RFC) already had an active team with 15 members and eight bikes, but we trained an additional 10 people so we could staff four bikes at each station and any response points in between. RFC was going to staff EMS tents at each station for the 48-hour operational period that the Pope was in town.
Bright and early at o-dark three thirty, the first wave of bike team members made its way to the two stations. Each area would have one ALS bike team, one BLS bike team, a Gator-type vehicle, and several EMS members – both ALS and BLS – to handle the crowds of people expected to arrive for the first trains at 5am. Each train was going to stop only at this specific station and then head directly into the city. It was estimated that each train would hold approximately 950 people. The last train into the city would depart that station at 12 noon.
After all the preparation and hype surrounding the event, it really was a bust from our standpoint. Yes, the people came to get on the trains but nowhere near the number predicted. There were no massive throngs of people trying to get on the train; instead, there were orderly people excited about going to see the Pope. That made it an enjoyable – albeit long – weekend.
RFC’s bike teams logged more than 200 miles just riding back and forth between stations and around the stations themselves. There was one medical emergency that required transport, and the patient was a SEPTA worker, not one of the visitors.
I guess it is better to have had the months of planning and training for the “what-ifs” and not have them happen than it is to be on the front page of the newspaper and be the lead story on the evening news for being caught unawares. We trained hard, had fun, and did our jobs, knowing that if something did happen, we were prepared to handle it.
John is currently the Chief Engineer at the Radnor Fire Company and heads up the EMS Bike Team. He helped start the team in 2005, took the IPMBA EMS Cyclist course in 2006 and was certified as an IPMBA Instructor in 2009. John has trained numerous cyclists from EMS squads in the metro Philly area for large-scale events like the US Open and the Papal Visit. When not riding, John spends his time as a volunteer firefighter and is an avid curler during the winter months. He can be reached at jgillespie437@gmail.com.
(c) 2016 IPMBA. This article appeared in the Winter 2016 issue of IPMBA News.