Lamberts Ambulance Company

That morning I came into work and they told me one of the Trade Centers got hit. We watched on TV while the other one got hit. Around noon we got a call from Inova Hospital, in Fairfax, VA, wanting to know if we could send an ambulance to transport people out to nursing homes and wherever else they could go so they could make room for victims from the Pentagon. We sent two ambulances over from here and one from Martinsburg with three crews.

The remaining of the day people in the office sat around and watched the news. We carried on with our normal routine of local calls. There were a few more than usual due to tension and anxiety. We transported people to the Veterans Hospital in Martinsburg.

Jim Lambert, age 55

We had been contacted by Inova Hospital to go in and get transports out to some different nursing homes and some different areas that were accepting patients. The hospital was trying to clear out room for patients from the Pentagon. There was five of us left from here to go down. As we started in to the D.C. area, it was the weirdest feeling for all, being buzzed by the Blackhawks. We got down to the Mt. Weather military base and we got escorted down the highway by a military patrol and also by the Blackhawks. Because by that time they had already gotten the alert about the possibility of ambulances being stolen and used as weapons.

We went ahead and went in. Our two contact hospitals were Inova Fairfax and Inova Fairoaks. We started on transports out. Going into D.C. it was a real eerie feeling seeing the smoke columns coming up from the Pentagon. I know you can talk to any other crews that was on it. I think they will all tell you the same thing. I think that's got to be one of the weirdest feelings in the world. That's the way it hit home to us on that one. We got in up with crews from Aircare and started a system in down there. Just going back and forth from the different hospitals-doing quite a few transports. We got to meet a lot of the people down there and help out with some of the staff. It was kind of a sickening feeling to know what was going on and there wasn't more that we could be doing. I gained a sense of pride in that at least we could go down and do what we could .

Between our station here in Romney and Hedgesville and Clarksburg we had no less than 50 volunteers that were ready to go. So we just kept enough to do what we needed to here. Shifted our other crews down to Inova. Shifted crews out of our Hedgesville office to go to the VA center in Martinsburg to assist them. They were already going under lock down. So we put crews in there to help them out for a while. Our Clarksburg crews were on stand by. They were covering for another ambulance company that was shifting people up to New York.

We kind of had people in all directions. Just a weird feeling. Something we hope we never have to go through again.

Fred Ganoe, age 40

To Remember...

In Appreciation....

The inscription reads:
FROM:

We Who Touch New Life
We Who Touch Life in Pain
We Who Touch Life Near Death
We Who Touch Death
We Who Do Make A Difference

TO:
You Have Done All This, and More
You Have Touched Us
Now You Touch God.

WE THANK YOU
by John Wayne Hughes, EMT-P, P000051
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