Coral Springs firefighters head to Venezuela for high-stakes rescue mission
.png "Rescue workers in Caraballeda, La Guaira State, Venezuela, on June 29 following twin earthquakes.")
Several members of the Coral Springs-Parkland Fire Department are headed to Venezuela after earthquakes left tens of thousands of people dead, missing or displaced.
Seven highly trained Coral Springs firefighters and EMTs have deployed as part of South Florida’s Urban Search and Rescue task force, joining an estimated 160 disaster experts on a 1,400-mile trip to the country’s northern coast.
For at least 10 days, task force members will assist those devastated by the quakes. Their 12-hour shifts include stabilizing piles of debris, searching for victims and survivors, safely extracting them from the rubble and providing first aid.
“We’re the people they call when things have gone terribly wrong,” retired fire chief Stephanie Palmer told the Coral Springs News during a November interview about her decades of service.
“We go in after every natural or even man-made disaster and search for people, look for victims and try to basically save everybody we can in a hurry.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) manages the Urban Search and Rescue program, which is composed of 28 task forces from across the country, including two from Florida.
Members must undergo extensive training in Search and Rescue, Medical, Technical or Logistics, and be prepared to deploy with six hours’ notice.
The deployment — Task Force 2’s first since Hurricane Milton in 2024 — came days after members of the task force came together at the Coral Springs Regional Institute of Public Safety for their annual training on emergency response for a variety of disaster situations, including earthquakes.
