Cherry Hill Firefighters Deployed To Surfside

CHERRY HILL, NJ — Three members of the Cherry Hill Fire Department have spent nearly a week assisting with rescue and recovery efforts at the collapsed Champlain Tower in Surfside, Florida.

Captain Bob MacDermott, Captain Dan DiRenzo and Firefighter Jake Speas are part of the New Jersey Task Force 1 (NJ-TF1) that arrived in Surfside on Friday, according to the Cherry Hill Professional Firefighters Facebook page.

"Your Cherry Hill Professional Firefighters thank our members and all of NJ-TF1 for their dedicated service and wish them a safe deployment," the Cherry Hill Fire Department wrote on its Facebook page. "We also continue to offer our thoughts and prayers to all of those affected by this terrible tragedy."

Ken Baum, an assistant fire chief in the Cherry Hill Fire Department, said the department is proud to have members who are willing to go through the training necessary to be a part of a Task Force team.

"It's a huge commitment on their own. A lot of training that they do, they do on their own in addition to what FEMA offers and what they learn within the department," Baum said. "They really are specialists, and they do that out of the love for the job and the love of the citizens."

Baum said, though the department has not been in communication with the firefighters in Surfside, it does reach out to their families to see if they need any assistance.

The firefighters will likely spend around two weeks in Surfside, Baum said.

The task force was one of 28 teams of the National Urban Search & Rescue Response System that were activated and deployed to Surfside, according to the Facebook page.

The New Jersey team is made up of 21 technically skilled individuals and 10 ground support personnel, according to WPVI-TV. The Surfside deployment marks the unit's eighth under FEMA since 2016.

"I know our people are ready to go," Kevin Morrissey, program manager for NJ-TF1 told WPVI. "They've trained for this for probably 20 years now, so this is their core mission, this is what they're ready to do."

The team previously assisted at the Twin Towers in the Sept. 11 attacks, the Tropicana Hotel 's parking garage and the Hackensack parking garage, according to WPVI.