David Harrington and Eddie Cate

Assistant Chiefs of Knoxville Volunteer Emergency Rescue Squad

Fifty years have lapsed since the Knoxville Volunteer Emerg-
ency Rescue Squad began safeguarding these streets. The organization has evolved from a grassroots brigade to a United Way-sponsored, highly specialized group of first responders, who answer to the beckoning call of state and federal emergency managing officials as 
well as local dispatches.

The rescue squad provides daily and specialty operations forces, with members adept with the “jaws-of-life” equipment to assist with the abundant need for vehicle extrication, prying shattered windshields and mangled twists of metal off car accident victims. KVERS also has six specialty operations teams: cave/vertical, heavy/technical, search/rescue, support, disaster/medical and water. When law enforcement officers need a diving crew to search for a drowning victim or body, KVERS’ water specialty team scours the murky brown lakes of the region and the Tennessee River with precision.

Just before the rescue squad met at Chilhowee Park May 10 to celebrate its golden anniversary, Eddie Cate, assistant chief of specialty operations, and David Harrington, assistant chief of daily operations, reminisced with Knoxville Voice about the organization’s growth in its half-century of life and where it’s headed in the future.

How has the rescue squad changed in 
50 years?

Harrington: It’s changed quite a bit. They’ve gone from sort of like a mom-and-pop operation. They primarily did a lot of the work themselves to keep the trucks on the road and things like that in the early days, and so it was a lot of begging and borrowing to get things done because the money just wasn’t readily available. And over the years, things changed primarily due to being recognized by the community as providing services to this area, and the money comes in a little better than it once did.

Things have changed because the liability on what we do has made it more necessary for us to train differently. The equipment is backed up by the liability of the manufacturers and things like that. And it’s not shooting-from-the-hip training. It’s second to none, probably since Day One.

The golden standard, I guess, is that we’re an organization that trains people from all over the United States, and we have an ability to write the books, so to speak. And we’ve always been blessed with talent and innovation from our people down here and the best from this industry. So I think that puts us above the standard.

A big thing in this business we have tried to steer away from is this kind of stovepiping, and that’s one thing that used to be rampant in this industry. None of the agencies really communicated with each other because of territorial issues. And one of the changes that has come about over the years is we all work together a lot better as opposed to isolating or working against each other.

That really means that if we have a major incident inside the City of Knoxville, they have the resources — they can do rescues as well — but if there is a certain component that they don’t possess, they can call us in or vice versa. That’s one of the things that we’ve benefited from is that, one, a lot of our members work for some of these other agencies like Knoxville Fire Department, local EMS. And that tears down some of those walls of limitations in communication, and it makes us talk to each other, and so when we do have something in other areas, we don’t have hesitation in calling each other. We’ve seen that change probably in the last 10 years.

Cate: We’ve gone from buying trucks and buying a fuse chest and a utility box to making our own rescue trucks putting on our own lights and sirens and stuff like that on it to where we order custom-made rescue trucks now that are hundreds of thousands of dollars because of the product liability. We went to custom-made trucks in 1983.

[Squad members] used to have to stand on street corners three or four times a year with a bucket or a boot and beg for money. They’d get a little bit of money from the city and county — not much. Back then, we didn’t have the United Way, so we didn’t get any money from them. So I think about in ’74 or ’76, the United Way said, ‘If yall’ll quit doing that, we’ll fund you.’