News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
The Jackson County Emergency Service has received the bids it needs to move forward with remounting its oldest ambulance.
Public Information Officer Derek Woolbright said that of the two bids they got one came in significantly lower at $180,000. Woolbright said remounting is a normal part of ambulance maintenance that has to be done as their vehicles wear down.
“You take the box that’s on the back of the ambulance, the part that the patient and the providers go into, and you essentially kind of remodel it like you do a home and then it goes on a brand new chassis,” Woolbright said. “So you essentially are just reusing a box while remodeling it and then putting it on a brand new chassis.”
Woolbright said the work is being delayed by the nationwide shortage in ambulance chassis but they hope to start in the next couple months. Woolbright said all five of their ambulances will have less than 80,000 miles on them once the work is complete, a first in his fifteen years with the department.
“When it just comes to regular wear and tear, this theoretically should put us in a situation to where we are at a minimum probably a couple years away from needing to replace another unit,” Woolbright said. “Which, by our standards, is a really good place to be in.”
Woolbright said the department should not have any issues in their operations when it comes time to send the ambulance away.
“We actually have a couple of extra units,” Woolbright said. “So we have a total of five EMS units and regularly we do not need that unit. So on occasion it can put us in a little bit of a bind if we have another truck go down and something crazy happens but overall it doesn’t affect us too bad and certainly won’t affect the regular response to the people of our county.”
Woolbright said the ambulance will be going from a 2016 chassis to either a 2024 or 2025 chassis depending on what is available.
“We’re very thankful to our commission that they’ve had the forethought and the foresight to say, ‘Hey, this is something we can do that’s going to put our EMS department in a really good shape in several years to come when it comes to those assets,'” Woolbright said. “So they made that decision to make that investment in this and I think long term it’s going to really pay off for our department.”
