A town called Finzel

Washington Post: We are pretty sure that city and county officials in the metropolitan Washington area, with their armies of paid and trained public servants, are confident that they could handle a horrific traffic pileup as well as any region in the country. But they still should find the time to journey up to a small community in Western Maryland to see how it's done. In a town called Finzel, so small that it has no mayor and no local police, local families, neighbors and friends took on a series of collisions involving 80 vehicles that killed two people and injured 90 May 23 and, working collectively and largely voluntarily through the weekend, virtually put the place back to normal by Monday. That's first-rate work by a first-class town in anybody's book.
Modest residents
Greg Dishong of the Eastern Garrett County Volunteer Fire and Rescue Department was modest about the whole thing. "We just rely on everybody to do their part," he said. "This community is really quick to react to this kind of thing." Would that all jurisdictions could say that. From out of nowhere, neighbors came to offer food and consolation to strangers. Some stranded families were offered places to stay. School buses showed up to take motorists to the Finzel fire hall, where volunteers set up rooms at a nearby lodge. Local towing companies worked nearly around the clock shuttling cars from the fire hall, where they were initially deposited, to a storage lot five miles away. Someone pressed a bulldozer into service to clear space in the lot for the damaged cars.
Finzel, a town too small to get an honorable mention in the census, took on a gargantuan task without a paid public workforce and got the job done without seeking anything in return from Maryland or Washington. "People were just wonderful," said Donna John of Dallas, Pa., who was a victim in the pileup. "Five minutes of sheer chaos, and then hours of calm. The human spirit is just amazing," she said. It sure is.