Emergency Management director retires from Greene County

April 07--SNOW HILL -- It takes a certain amount of strength to be an emergency responder.

When seven children lost their lives as a tractor-trailer hit a West Greene Elementary school bus near Shine in the early 1980s, Randy Skinner was there handling the aftermath as an EMS volunteer.

In 1987, a tornado ravaged Greene County killing a number of people, and in 1999, Hurricane Floyd hit and many people in Pitt County lost their homes. Then in 2011, another tornado destroyed a number of homes in the Snow Hill area.

Skinner was there each time to help pick up the pieces of people's lives.

"I can tell you how I dealt with it, I cried a lot -- after it was over with," he said. "You try not to think about it while you're doing it. You're doing it to help people."

In March, Skinner, 60, retired as Emergency Management director for Greene County for medical reasons after a 20-year career in the emergency field in Greene and Pitt counties.

About 11 years were with Greene County, where he started and ended his career.

Lenoir County Emergency Management Director Roger Dail is filling in as interim in emergencies and administrative duties for no extra pay through a county-to-county mutual aid agreement. He said he or his staff have been working in Greene County at least parts of every day this week.

"Obviously, from an emergency standpoint," Dail said, "they would call me. ... If something needs to be done, obviously we'd do it."

The son of Elsie and the late Robert Skinner, Randy Skinner moved back with his family to his mother's homeland in the Shine/Free Gospel Road area when his father retired.

When he was 19, he hooked up with the Shine Volunteer Fire Department, working his way up the ladder while working for Frigidaire in Kinston. When he made fire chief, he started training for fire inspection certification.

Skinner's first paid position was assisting on an EMS truck.

"To be honest with you, I wanted to have a vehicle with a red light on it," he said. "But then when you get involved a lot, it's giving back to your community."

He worked out of the same office from which he retired, and after about about a year he took a job as a fire inspector in Pitt County.

Skinner earned certification in fire investigation and started training for emergency management, finishing the training at the executive level when he returned to work in Greene County. His Emergency Management and EMS staff totaled about 18 people.

In recent years with the county in financial straits, Skinner has managed to make ends meet with a shrinking budget.

"It was difficult because some things that you wanted, you couldn't get, or some things you needed, you couldn't get," he said, "so you try to make the best of what you got. We still provided the best EMS care that we could provide with the budget cuts in place."

Dail praised the quality of EMS staff in Greene County.

"He's got a fine staff here," he said on Monday.

Skinner's career has ended with three schools having emergency shelters with generators, paid mostly by state grant funds following tornado damage to the high school and the destruction of the middle school. The department is soon to get a new EMS truck.

Skinner said he hopes Greene County will be able to fund equipment and training to raise the bar from intermediate level to paramedic level, with at least one paramedic per shift.

"Emergency service workers are just as human as anybody else," Skinner said. "And we cry just as much as a lot of other people do, except we cry behind closed doors, I don't know why."

Today, there is stress debriefing teams for emergency responders, he said, and it seems to help them following tragic wrecks and other disasters.

The bottom line has been the fulfillment received when helping people.

"I could ride through an area that has gotten demolished by a tornado or a hurricane and come back several months later," Skinner said, "and the people that didn't have a house have got a house now. Knowing that we helped them gave me the reason to go on."

Skinner said he misses the people he's worked around the most. He's married to Terry Skinner and plans to spend time with his family. They have two grown children, Nicki and Samantha, and two grandsons.

Margaret Fisher can be reached at 252-559-1082 or Margaret.Fisher@Kinston.com. Follow her on Twitter at @MargaretFishr.

Copyright 2015 - The Free Press, Kinston, N.C.