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After Haiti, a red-carpet family reunion

January 29, 2010

Dad was in Haiti on a rescue mission, but the Pinewood Derby waits for no man. So 8-year-old Caden Wells finished building his little wooden car with relatives, christened it “USA” in honor of his father’s faraway search-and-rescue squad and raced it to a personal best third-place finish.

For the Wells family, life went on after Los Angeles County fire captain Bryan Wells shipped out for a 16-day tour of duty in earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

But life was not the same.

For the families of the 72-member Los Angeles County Fire Urban Search and Rescue team that returned home to a hero’s welcome Thursday, the time away was measured in hope, prayer, worry, nightly conference calls—and kids counting the days till they could start hanging out with their dads again.

Caden, along with his mom, Tara, and the rest of the family—Brady, 6, Nathan, 4, and baby Ellie—was in the crowd of 300 that greeted the returning squad at the department’s Technical Operations center in Pacoima Thursday evening.

“I missed him a lot,” Caden said simply as he waited. Nathan was more exuberant as he thought of what he’d been missing.

“Tickle Daddy!” he yelled. He said he was looking forward to wrestling with his father again, too. “We both win,” he said, then hollered gleefully “My dad is a hero!”

The kid knows what he’s talking about on that point.

Wells, a 13-year county fire department veteran, led one of the two fire rescue teams in Haiti. Dispatched to by the U.S. government, the task force made 9 dramatic rescues and garnered international attention for the county team during their mission.

Tara Wells is used to her husband’s dangerous deployments. He has fought wildfires in Northern California for weeks at a time, and traveled with the county search and rescue team to Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. But for her, Haiti was different.

“This particular deployment was by far the one that gave the most anxiety problems,” Tara said. The uncertainty of aftershocks, the unstable crowd situation, all made her uneasy. “The first couple days were really rough.”

But she gained courage from prayer and a church retreat the first weekend of the mission. The daily updates for family members from Haiti via conference call, something new that the department implemented during this trip, bolstered her spirits as well.

She designed special T-shirts for her kids to wear to the homecoming. The words on the shirts, beside a green map of Haiti, said it all: “The earth shook. The people called. My daddy went. My dad’s a hero.”

Word got around, and before you knew it, everybody wanted one. She ended up handing out 75 to the crowd–navy for the boys, pink for little girls.

Finally, the search and rescue team arrived, after a long traveling day in which they drove from Port-au-Prince to the Dominican Republic, then flew to Orlando and on to LAX, where buses awaited to transport them to Pacoima.

When Wells popped off the bus, his boys climbed all over him, and he took little Ellie in his arms for a kiss.

Then Wells, 40, spoke a little of what they’d seen and done. He was the team manager for the 30-person “Blue Squad,” one of the two rescue teams that the L.A. contingent formed. The worst moment came when his team had to extract a corpse in view of a trapped woman who was already injured and screaming. “It was upsetting to her to see that,” Wells recalls. But the team pulled her out alive, as a throng of Haitians shouted “USA, USA, USA!”

Supervisors Mark Ridley-Thomas, Michael D. Antonovich and Zev Yaroslavsky attended the homecoming. “This is the most versatile fire department in the world,” Yaroslavsky said proudly.

Tara Wells spoke, too. “Our hearts were with you as we watched, and we could not stop watching,” she told the team.

And she thanked the department for supporting the families with aid, advice and a steady flow of news from Haiti. “Words cannot describe our gratitude,” she said, “for taking care of us while they were gone.”