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DENTON – Although the Potomac River air disaster happened the evening of Jan. 29 fewer than 100 miles away, Rick Barton of Denton is playing an indirect role in helping first responders.
For nearly a dozen years, Barton has served as chief executive officer of the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation, Inc. (ICISF).
While the trauma of the disaster has and will take a toll on family, coworkers and friends of those who perished, first responders on the recovery scene see and experience a different kind of emotional, perhaps traumatic, stress.
ICISF trains peer support teams to respond to the needs of those who respond to the scene of a disaster or harrowing incident involving fatalies.
Shortly before 10 a.m. Jan. 30, in a text message to the Caroline Review, Barton “confirmed that ICISF-trained teams are involved with the support for first responders in the Potomac River,”
Barton’s association with ICISF began during his tenure as superintendent of the Maryland Park Service for 17 years, helping his staff deal with “a lot of tragic incidents,” he said in a Nov. 26, 2024, interview.
In a phone interview Thursday morning Jan. 30, Barton was en route to the Polar Bear Plunge at Sandy Point State Park to serve as emcee, but he said he would be communicating with his ICISF staff, although they would not be directly involved in the response effort.
“Our policy is we do not self-deploy unless asked to,” Barton said. “That's our first premise, always. And people that we have trained and teams that we train, we advise them the same way.”
“By and large, the way the ICISF deploys its resources is through teams we've trained, and then they are contacted locally,” he said.
Barton said the peer support programs of at least some of the agencies involved in the recovery operation in the region were likely ICISF-trained. “When there have been other tragedies or disasters in that area, people we trained were there,” he said.
Barton said that if other “teams or individuals or professionals that will respond to help people cope are not ICISF-trained, that's okay.As long as they're properly trained in a good system, and they have a good system in place, that's all that matters. It doesn't have to be our system.”
“This is an incredible tragedy,” Barton said. “Most responders are cut this way that when something like this happens, they want to be there. … They're ready to go, and anybody and everybody who has that training that is available wants to go.”
“I am sure that they have plenty of people ready to help,” he said. “That doesn't mean that they don't suffer from the trauma of exposure to it, and they know that's part of it, yet they go anyway.”
