September a busy month for ambulance service
MOUND CITY – On Tuesday, Oct. 10, the Linn County Commissioners heard weekly reports from the fire department and ambulance service.
Louis Aloi, American Medical Response (AMR) representative, reported that last week was a very busy week with 43 calls resulting in 19 transports. He said there had already been three call on Tuesday morning.
He told the commissioners that when the new radio system gets set up and starts going through AMR, it will reduce a lot of the calls to the Linn County dispatcher.
Aloi said that with the hiring of Larry Maloney, formerly of the Linn County Sheriff’s Office, as a paramedic, this will be the first time in three years that AMR has been fully staffed in Linn County.
Aloi told the commissioners that September was one of the busiest months ever with 154 calls and 74 transports. He said the numbers showed that response zones seem to set be distributed correctly.
According to Aloi, District 1 had 49 calls, District 2 had 53 calls and District 3 had 57 calls. The transports averaged 23 per district. He said that the average response time for the entire county was under 14 minutes 45 seconds. He said that was fantastic because rural emergency medical services (EMS) usually runs in the 20 minute range.
Aloi said there had been five helicopter transports in September consisting of three strokes, one trauma and one general medical. The numbers by city were:
• Blue Mound 12
• Centerville 6
• La Cygne 29
• Linn Valley 19
• Mound City 27
• Parker 17
• Pleasanton 36
• Prescott 5
and two calls showed they were from the Lane area.
Aloi told the commissioners that he did not think that AMR lost more than two to three calls to other agencies during the month of September.
Fire Chief Randy Hegwald was unable to attend the meeting. His report showed that there had been 12 incidents for the week ending Oct. 7. They were four medical assist with the EMS crew, two off-road vehicle or heavy equipment fires, one gas leak, natural or LPG, one public service, one assist invalid, one on incident found on arrival at dispatch address, one CO detector activation due to malfunction, and one alarm system with no fire, unintentional.