Copyright 2006 Lancaster Newspapers, Inc.
By JON RUTTER
Sunday News (Lancaster, Pa.)
LANCASTER, Pa. — “To this day,” Mark Rhinier said, “I don’t know how I got out.”
It was a gorgeous Saturday in June 1981. Rhinier, then a 17-year-old Wheatland Fire Co. volunteer, was on a risky mission to save lives when he almost lost his own.
An 8-year-old boy had fallen into an old septic tank in School Lane Hills. Carbon dioxide gas had overcome the two paramedics who rescued him.
The slightly-built Rhinier was the first one sent through the tank’s 18-inch opening.
“It was straight down,” recalled the present-day Lancaster city firefighter. “It looked like a well.”
Bausman Fire Co. volunteer Jeffrey Jones followed Rhinier in. But the two men ran out of air as they worked feverishly to help the paramedics.
The 18-year-old Jones died that day. So did Bruce Ditlow, 24, and Kevin Weatherlow, 23, paramedics and best friends since high school.
Rhinier had collapsed on a pile of grass clippings in the pit. According to other rescuers, he stayed conscious long enough to grab a rope and be hauled to freedom.
Rhinier said he often thinks about the three victims.
Now, thanks to a new monument at the county’s Public Safety Training Center in East Hempfield Township, emergency responders killed in the line of duty here will never be forgotten.
Members of the Ditlow and Weatherlow families helped break ground for the $100,000 memorial at 10:30 a.m. Saturday during the training center’s annual open house.
U.S. Rep. Joe Pitts praised first responders for their sacrifices and presented a citation, as did state Rep. Katie True, state Sen. David “Chip” Brightbill and the county commissioners.
A 2005 Pierce Contender fire engine donated by The Lancaster County Firemen’s Association was dedicated at 11 a.m.
Many turned out despite rain and wind to view the displays and chat with the uniformed men and women who, among other jobs, battle fires, chase bad guys, splint broken bones and mop up hazardous waste.
“These people are a safety net” for the public, said Betty Ditlow, mother of one of the paramedics felled 25 years ago.
She said her son and his buddy would have been “proud and pleased” to know that the boy in the tank survived.
“Help people,” she said. “That’s what they wanted to do.”
The tradition of service is centuries old, and still dangerous.
About 100 emergency personnel die nationwide each year, according to Nicholas Summers, Firemen’s Association first vice president and chairman of the memorial committee.
He said some 50 first responders have fallen here since 1729, when Lancaster received its charter from Chester County.
The toll includes three emergency medical workers, 14 police officers and a constable, said Summers, who is researching the issue.
Firefighting was even more dangerous in the 1960s than it is now, said the Firemen’s Association’s Ernest A. Rojahn Jr., recalling the days before air packs and heat-repelling bunker clothing.
In the more distant past, Summers said, one firefighter was supposed to have died after being run over by a horse-drawn steam wagon.
County emergency management director Randall Gockley said a state trooper of the 1880s was fatally kicked by his steed.
“Those types of things you forget,” he said. Until now.
The memorial in front of the Public Safety building at 101 Champ Blvd. will be built by ART Design Group of Lancaster and will consist of three life-size bronze statues representing a police officer, a firefighter and a paramedic.
The sculpture will be flanked by five granite stones bearing the names of the honorees. County, state and U.S. flags will stand guard, and a brick walkway will provide access.
The 700-foot-square monument is to be completed in time for a Sept. 11 dedication.
Fire training coordinator Rick Kane, 537-4194, is still seeking to identify first responders who died at their posts.
The nonprofit Lancaster County Public Safety Training Center Foundation is raising money for the project by selling $100 bricks to be engraved with the names of donors and placed in the walkway.
Contributions for bricks, benches, trees, flagpoles and memorial stones may be made by cash, check or credit card by calling 537-4190.
Sharon Ebersole, the widow of Kevin Weatherlow, attended Saturday’s event with her daughter, Kristen, who was 21/2 years old at the time of the accident.
Mrs. Ebersole said the memorial will be an especially fitting tribute for paramedics, a group the public does not commonly associate with mortal risk.
Mark Rhinier agreed.
“This is long in coming,” added Rhinier, who said he always admired the paramedics from the St. Joseph Hospital Medic 1 Unit.
Ditlow and Weatherlow were of that elite group.
The creases on their white shirts were almost sharp enough to cut, Rhinier said. “Their boots were like mirrors.”
Ditlow went into the pit first. Weatherlow followed with an air tank that he tried to share with his friend.
But the carbon dioxide from the decaying grass knocked them both out.
The paramedics were big guys, Rhinier remembered, and, as was the custom then, full-bearded.
He and Jones could not lift them quickly enough to the top of the grass pile.
Rhinier said automatic warnings on the many air cylinders that had been lowered into the tank by that time drowned out the sound of the alarms on his apparatus.
“It was continuous alarms going off so I didn’t hear my own.”
After the deaths and the close call, he said, he never considered giving up emergency service.
“If anything, it made my commitment to continue even stronger.”