Tricia Cruz (Rochester, N.Y.) -- No matter how difficult, emergency workers, must put their emotions aside when responding to an accident scene.
Bloomfield's Assistant Fire Chief Brian Rayburn was one of the first to respond to the crash that killed five young women Tuesday night.
He said this was the worst accident he and many other emergency workers had ever seen in his 22 years with the department.
Rayburn said, "On an emotional and mental level you can't prepare for it. You do the best you can."
Fire Coordinator Jeff Harloff said, "I can make a connection with any one of the five families. I have family members that age."
Fire Chief Bill Smith said, "The next day when the pictures came out that put more of a personal spin on it."
"Communication is the key component of trying to recover from this," Harloff said. “They are firefighters, EMTs, but first and foremost they're human beings, they're fathers, mothers and they have families to go home to."
Emergency workers have a support group where they can share their feelings with others the way Smith did Wednesday night.
"It was interesting to find out that the rest of the people had the same feelings I did. Same issues," said Smith.
He said he hopes he never runs into something like this again. He and his colleagues know there's no guarantee.
“We generally don't see loss of life on this magnitude. But with every tragic call like that you're going to have five or ten very good calls where you walk away extremely happy with what you did, and the outcome," Rayburn said.
In the case of Tuesday's accident, there was little emergency workers could do. When they arrived at the scene, the SUV and the tractor trailer were already consumed with flames.
