Inside the Fire and Rescue Command Center at the Booz Allen Classic golf tournament, two rescue squad captains sit monitoring radio calls and weather maps.
Drawing more than 100,000 visitors, the tournament is one of the biggest annual events in Montgomery County. On a quiet day, they’ll handle lacerations, swollen appendages, heat exhaustion and the occasional sprain, fracture or break. On a busy day — a bad day — they could see much worse.
Behind them, on the wall, is a map of Congressional Country Club’s sprawling golf course and facilities. It is divided up into three command districts, each of which is assigned roving teams of paramedics and emergency medical technicians, course physicians and first aid volunteers, transport carts and advanced life support equipment.
The map evokes the county maps divided the same way by fire and rescue districts — each with its own equipment and responders. In fact, the tournament operations are essentially the same as countywide fire and rescue.
“It’s no different from the way we handle fires. With a fire — on a large geographical area we have divisions, put a supervisor in each division, and they report to … an operations section chief, who’s looking over all of this,” said Captain Mike Collins, incident commander at the Classic on Saturday.
There are only two differences: the scale (although the tournament will draw as many visitors as live in many American counties), and the number of people being hit by golf balls.
COLLINS’ 28 MEN and women are moving about in golf cart teams, basic life support and advanced life support transport cart teams, and bike teams. The crew is drawn from all of the volunteer fire stations in the county, as well as paid career firefighters. Two engine companies are involved. Some of the smaller equipment is on loan from Prince George’s County, which established a major event force after construction of the Redskins stadium there.
In a change from previous years, fire and rescue is coordinating closely with police operations at this year’s Classic.
“Usually police has their thing going, fire has their thing going. We’re doing things jointly now,” Collins said.
At 12:10, the rescue teams are in the midst of two transports — patients that need to go to the hospital rather than being treated on site. Two children have had some sort of reaction causing their face and eyes to swell and turn red.
The rescuers ask the children some questions and surmise that the problem is the grass. Golf course grass is sometimes treated with fertilizers and chemicals, and they have been touching the grass, and then touching their eyes, triggering the reactions, rescuers guessed.
A woman arrives at the operations trailer with a laceration on her leg. She receives bandages but does not need stitches.
The incidents come in spurts. The noon rush is over and the rescuers laugh over their box lunches in the air conditioned trailer.
At 1 p.m., the calls pick up again.
A woman has cut her hand while slicing tomatoes. She comes into the trailer in a chef’s hat and apron. She chats with the rescuers.
A spectator on the sixth green has been hit by a golf ball.
The massive and redundant communication network at the tournament is both a blessing and a curse. Most spectators have their cell phones turned off in accordance with tournament rules, so the usual avalanche of cell phone calls when there’s an incident is curtailed. But every one of the tournament’s volunteers and staff has a walkie-talkie radio as well as every course marshal, every vendor, every ice delivery cart.
THE RESULT is that when something goes wrong, the rescuers hear about it nine different times, with nine different explanations and locations.
“There are so many people out here with radios that if something happens, four people are calling it in, and they really don’t know where it is, but they need help now. And just about every call we’ve had, it’s been reported [that it’s] somewhere else too,” Collins said.
Even when rescuers can pinpoint the incident, they have to try to reach it while navigating an unfamiliar, sprawling golf course, and they have to do so silently.
“The PGA doesn’t want to see the carts moving all around, so you’ve got to be invisible,” Collins said.
The consensus is that the tournament has been quiet, and that no news is good news. Most of the calls have been for blisters (“wrong shoes” Collins says) and heat exhaustion, but with a breeze kicking up Saturday and plenty of shade, even that has been relatively quiet.
And since stitches, swelling, and heat stroke are all in a day’s work for fire and rescue, the real drama comes for spectators who lose a day at the tournament to a bit of bad planning or bad luck.
“We had a guy the first day of the tournament, Thursday, paid 50 bucks, walked in the gate, tripped and blew his quads out,” Collins said.