LYNNE LARKIN

A person plunged into the Indian River Lagoon just before Christmas this year on a quiet Saturday near dawn.  Whether carelessness or something else, it is a dangerous thing to land on water even from a relatively short height.  Although it was an early Saturday morning and few others were even awake in the dusky dawn hours, there were a couple of kids fishing on the platform just below that same bridge.  Bless the early risers, they immediately jumped into the cold murky water to help get our swimmer back to safety.  Having designed the “new” Barber Bridge with a people-friendly walkway, the civilian rescuers were much closer to giving aid than anyone from the shore might have been.

The Vero Beach Police and County Water Rescue were already on the scene and in seconds had the situation in hand, getting the soggy victim to shore and to the hospital, just minutes away.

It never ceases to amaze all of us, when we hear about these things, how neighbors can act so quickly to help each other and how having well-trained and dedicated law enforcement officers is vital to everyone who lives or visits this area.  We’re also still small enough that nothing is very far away, including the hospital.

We are not the only community with good Samaritans and excellent emergency responders, but there are places where this would have ended differently.   Dead rivers don’t bring fishermen to its shores.  Long call-to-response times for the police department, or no 9-1-1 center, or too few personnel to handle more than one emergency at a time – these all matter in the seconds it can take for someone to drown.  They don’t come to mind, of course, until we’ve cut personnel too far, or let the more experienced officers and fire/medics go to better-paying but less rewarding jobs.

Our tradition of valuing our city police, of understanding that they aren’t flipping burgers or making mortgage loans but rather taking risks and facing stressful, dangerous situations every day, that value we ascribe to our defenders of the community hasn’t died.  The past few years of being degraded by some members of the City Council, however, has not done much for morale.  In spite of this, even if it had been Craig Fletcher stumbling over the railing, our first responders would be there in a heartbeat.

In every job, employees want and need to be valued, not just with money, but with respect for even the supposedly smallest of positions.  Vero Beach has always tried to make sure that our employees know how much they are appreciated.  It was, at least before the past few years, a warm place to work where people felt a little like family.  People stayed, they gave extra time, they smiled as best they could even when the grouchier members of the public berate them for things having nothing to do with their own jobs.

Good people who stayed on the job for their whole careers.

If you turn these good people into numbers, unconcerned with their talents, experience, or dedication, if you “benchmark” them against far worse communities who have not valued their government workers, where graft and greed become common and low pay is necessary because the elected officials care only about re-election and not the reality of their own community – if you forget how much we differ from other parts of Florida, then we will start losing.  Losing talent, losing loyalty, and even losing lives.

Other than being alive, the Saturday swimmer’s physical condition remains private, but he was alive in no small part owing to those brave kids and the equally brave emergency service personnel who face such near tragedies more often than our residents know.

As 2014 rolls out the new, let’s hope we all take stock of how many valuable assets, how many different and special things, our old City represents.  Happy New Year to our neighbors, many blessings to our city employees, every one of them but especially Office Schnurr and the other first responders who were there that morning, and we’ll hope to get through this tough year together.