Six months in, progress has been made.

The revamping of Beaufort County’s departments that now fall under the umbrella of emergency services is taking place incrementally, as new Director of Beaufort County Emergency Services Carnie Hedgepeth pulls together the first responder community.

On the surface, the last six months appear to be a simple reorganization: when Hedgepeth came on board in July, four separate county departments were merged into the single Emergency Services department — Emergency Management, EMS, Fire Marshal and Animal Control. Look a little closer, however, and the changes are much more widespread, as the push has been to get all pieces of the emergency services system working together.

“The best accomplishment thus far has been the building of relationships, and that’s both internal — we have an excellent staff — and each of those individuals building relationships in the community, and that’s both in the government setting and the public setting,” Hedgepeth

said.

To Hedgepeth, Emergency Services is about bringing people together to work toward common objectives. The first item on that list was the county’s emergency response when water resources were required. Though Sidney Dive Team, Bunyan Volunteer Fire Department, Washington Fire-Rescue-EMS and Bath Volunteer Fire Department each had vessels and responded to on-the-water emergencies, there was no standard operating procedure. So Hedgepeth invited representatives from those squads and Aurora Volunteer Fire Department, which was then in the process of obtaining its own vessel, to come to the table and work together to create a standardized response.

“An individual can come up with a great plan, but if you put experienced individuals in the same room, they can come up with an even better plan, and that’s what we were able to do,” Hedgepeth said. “The process of coming up with these procedures is putting a group together that represents everyone and saying, ‘What’s your No. 1 challenge?’”

Keeping track of personnel at fire scenes when multiple squads respond, determining a standardized response to specific rescue situations — high angle, trench, confined spaces — will be up for reviewing and revamping with the input of county first responders. To the effort, Hedgepeth is aiming to create specialized teams that span county departments.

“In those subjects, we know we have qualified people throughout the county. Each department may have one or 10 people who are trained in it, but it’s a strain on any department by themselves to handle that incident,” he said.

Hedgepeth said he’s aiming to streamline processes and work more efficiently, look at where the departments under Emergency Services can help one another and avoid services being duplicated. He called the process both challenging and rewarding — and most rewarding has been people coming together to work toward serving the community.

“The biggest thing in our success is positive relationships. As long as we can get people with a servant’s heart pulling in the same direction, great things are going to happen,” Hedgepeth said. “And, really, if you don’t have people working together, you don’t have anything.”