When Liz Pierce was growing up in a little town in South Georgia near the Florida state line, could she have imagined she would one day be a walking advertisement for rescue services when she grew up? Pierce does a little bit of everything in the emergency services world.
She is less than six months away from completing her training to become a firefighter and is also in the process of completing the nursing program at Chattanooga State. She is already certified to do search and rescue work with Hamilton County’s Special Tactics and Rescue Services, has just joined the hazardous materials team and also works at Parkridge Valley Hospital. Pierce has been doing search and rescue for about three years, and enjoys it very much, she says. The team does a little bit of everything, from evidence collection to finding lost subjects to recovering people. During the floods in Nashville (on Pierce’s 21st birthday), her team went to help. They also helped with the East Ridge flooding the year before that. They went to Ringgold to help as well, and Pierce ended up staying there 10 days, napping in her car when possible.
The team does pretty much anything that is needed, and is always looking to do more. For example, Pierce is an avid kayaker and is working with a few members from her team to incorporate kayaking into the search and rescue they do. One of Pierce’s friends, Joshua Ingle, knew of her kayaking background and her knowledge of swift water rescue, and began to try to convince her to initially join the search and rescue team that he was on. Pierce says he finally convinced her, and she’s been on it ever since. The search and rescue team is also where she met her boyfriend, who also does EMT work and is a firefighter. “I love it. It’s like a whole new family,” she says.
To be on the team, an applicant completes “rookie school” which is held every one or two years, Pierce explains. The school, includes two to three weekends worth of classes with a written test and basic knowledge tests for what to do in certain scenarios and the rules to follow under the National Incident Command System. They must take at least four courses that cover incident command, and know the material backward and forward, she says. Team members also have to have knowledge of radiological situations in the event of an emergency at the Sequoyah Nuclear Plant.
Much of this basic knowledge also translates into the firefighting training, and a lot of the search and rescue team members are retired firefighters, she says. It was a firefighter named Jim Poplin that started the search and rescue team 28 years ago because his firefighting team was responding to so many rescue calls. While many may think that Pierce is an anomaly as a woman in these emergency rescue areas, she says she knows several women in firefighting and rescue, and doesn’t think the work is too difficult for women who put their mind to it. In her firefighting class of 24 people, four of the class members are women. While the work is not easy for anyone, male or female, it’s definitely something that is doable for women, she says.
“It takes an adrenaline junkie to do it because most women [perceive] smoke, fire, having to run up ladders, and having to wear this big gear, [as] not being the most feminine thing in the world,” Pierce says. Yet, Pierce says she loves the emergency world and the opportunity to help people. “You have to want to help people. That’s my biggest thing – to just give back and do something, to have a job that actually means something,” she says. “It may not mean something to everyone in world, but to me, I know I am helping people. It may not be on the same level as a doctor, but in your time of need, who do you call?”
Pierce says she enjoys getting her hands dirty, and since someone has to do this type of work, she figures, why not her? “Just because we are women doesn’t mean we can’t do it. A lot of people look at me and [don’t] realize I can do all this. I may look little but I can do a lot more than people think,” she says. From rigging up a system of ropes, to getting someone up or down to safety, or to doing medical assistance, Pierce does the job.
“I’ve never seen anything that makes me think that you have to be a man to do this,” she says. “I think the public just generally perceives that it involves all this hard physical labor, and I think that’s what scares women away.” If Pierce is a walking advertisement for the abilities that a woman can do if she sets her mind to them, she’s one of the best ads out there.