Unsure of her future, high school sophomore Alexa Paz peered out the windows of the Wheaton public library onto Arcola Avenue’s Wheaton Volunteer Rescue Squad, from which volunteers run toward any emergency — from birthing babies to saving people from collapsing buildings, often at tremendous risk to their lives.

Now, two years later, her work as a volunteer EMT in training is stealing her sleep and inspiring her life’s work.

To Paz, each colleague at the Wheaton Volunteer Rescue Squad has a unique disposition for helping people.

It isn’t only broken legs or lacerated fingers that the ambulance responds to, she said, recalling a female patient in a bout of depression. “We were able to make her laugh, and that impacted me,” she said.

Paz is one of over 100 squad members who, outside of their day jobs as paramedics and nurses, dedicate their nights and weekends to emergency response in the Wheaton area.

With over 11,000 calls annually, the Wheaton Volunteer Rescue Squad is considered to be one of the busiest in Montgomery County, said Todd Sniffin, soon to be chief of WVRS.

Many of Montgomery County’s emergencies are responded to by volunteers. But at WVRS, every response on nights and weekends is 100% volunteer.

A 40-hour-a-week volunteer job

Emergencies can strike at any time, in any kind of way.

In September, an ambulance crew was dispatched after a 16-year-old pedestrian was struck by a vehicle and killed. On a late October afternoon, they responded to an apartment where someone had called in a panic over chest pains.

It’s the kind of service to the community that attracted Rhonda Cohen. In 1985, she was 16 years old when she joined WVRS at a recruiting event in the Wheaton Mall parking lot.

While most women stuck to medic roles at a fire station, Cohen felt called to firefighting. But fire work, her colleagues told her, was “NGA.” “No Girls Allowed,” Cohen chuckled.

She took every single class that the Fire Rescue Academy offered and became the first WVRS female fire officer.

“When police retire, they turn in their badge and gun,” said Cohen. But “a firefighter can retire and volunteer to fight fires. It can never end if you never let it.”

Teddy Schrenk spends about 100 hours a week at the station, outside of working nights as an ICU nurse.

On a Saturday morning, you can catch him brushing up on rescue skills in the station’s parking lot, breaking every window of a donated Toyota minivan and using the jaws of life to rip open the doors.

“Yes, I do this for free,” Schrenk says to his bewildered friends.

Jack Stoddard, a full-time paramedic in West Baltimore, drives nearly an hour to volunteer at WVRS. He found it gratifying when he had learned enough American Sign Language to communicate with a deaf patient.

In the past five years the station has fielded an average of 29 calls a day, said Lou Kaufman, the current president of WVRS. It’s Kaufman’s 55th year with the squad but former Chief Robert Lawson, known as “Pops,” joined in 1957, making 2025 his 68th year.

When disaster strikes

WVRS was founded in January 1955 by a group of disgruntled members of the Kensington Volunteer Fire Department. In its first year it was nine men and a 1950 Cadillac purchased for $850, operating out of what is now the location of the Wheaton Metro station, according to a history written by Cohen, Kaufman and other members of the squad’s Historical Committee.

The team, and its impact, grew: from 601 annual calls to over 10,000, from a budget of thousands to millions, and from a few dedicated members to hundreds. Community donors chipped in from the beginning. Then Montgomery County and the state began to boost its budget.

In 1982, WVRS medics were there when Air Florida 90 crashed into Washington’s 14th Street Bridge. A year later the rescue crew battled a “towering inferno" at the Gramax Building on 13th Street in downtown Silver Spring.

On Sept. 11, 2001, WVRS EMS units helped transport victims from the Pentagon, and in 2002, they helped those shot in the Beltway sniper attacks.

WVRS life member Kenny Lacayo was one of three first responders who died in 2022 while battling a fire at a vacant home on Stricker Street. His fire suit is preserved in his former locker in an eternally lit memorial in the WVRS’ bay.

“It is the worst day of someone’s life for them to call 911,” said seasoned EMT Vicky Peñate.

Peñate, who graduated from school during the pandemic, took a job at a COVID-19 testing site where she heard stories from first responders that inspired her to join WVRS.

Many WVRS members grew up in Wheaton, and on a call, “this could be someone you know, or their grandma, sister, aunt,” Peñate said.

Once, Peñate did respond to her home – five minutes down the road from the station – to transport her niece to the hospital after a bad cut.

Forty years later, Cohen still responds to emergencies — stepping into the same heavy black boots and fire-retardant gear, jumping into the rescue squad’s 37-foot-long, 12-foot-tall, 60,620-pound rescue truck.

She said she has delivered three and a half babies, (on one call the mother had already got out the head and a shoulder). She once fell through the ceiling of a house on fire.

On quiet nights, she’ll help prepare a massive lasagna or bowl of chili for the squad to share. Volunteers spend nights in one of the station’s 24 bunk beds, while watching “Chicago PD” and scrutinizing its inaccuracies.

“We are,” she said, “a chosen family.”