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Canfield Fire adds back-up ambulance
By ROBERT CONNELLY
CANFIELD
The Cardinal Joint Fire District has begun training officials on its new ambulance.
It will serve as a backup in case Lane LifeTrans can’t get an ambulance out to provide care.
The new ambulance will also help if an ambulance would get tied up in construction traffic for the U.S. Route 224 bridge replacement and widening over state Route 11.
Fire district Chief Don Hutchison said he had approached Lane to do a co-op similar to the one in Austintown, but Canfield does not have the volume of calls for a co-op.
Randall Pugh, vice president of Lane, concurred and said that Lane also has ambulances in nearby Boardman and Austintown as well. “They’re within six to eight minutes [response time] regularly so it’s always worked well,” Pugh said.
The ambulance recently was painted and upgraded – at a cost of about $9,600 – after the 2002 vehicle was purchased for $10,000 from Beaver Township. In total, the district spent almost $20,000.
The ambulance would have at least one paramedic and one emergency medical services person, EMT, on it when in use. Rob Tieche Jr., director of EMS for the CJFD, said there are 23 paramedics, 14 EMTs and two advanced EMTs on staff.
“They would try to find another ambulance for us,” Tieche said of when an ambulance hadn’t been available through Lane. “Running paramedics we have the capability to stabilize the patient, but we didn’t have the capability prior to now to get the patient to the hospital. ... There’s only so much we can do in the field. They need to be seen by a doctor or physician.”
But this also means that Canfield could assist in a situation like if there was a “multiple patient, multiple casualty incident where there’s not enough ambulances available in the county so we just added another ambulance to the mix,” Tieche detailed.
Training will go on for about two weeks, Tieche and Hutchison said. But Tieche noted, “the good thing about the majority of our people is they have worked at some point on an ambulance so they have some experience, some background for actually working on an ambulance.”