Officers hope to build resilience, resources

WARRENTON —  A new medical transport vehicle will soon hit the ground as part of an ongoing effort to address gaps in Clatsop County’s emergency response system.

The Warrenton Fire Department purchased the ambulance from the Pacific County Fire District in October for $4,999, plus a vehicle trade, said Fire Chief Brian Alsbury.

“We met with them a couple times, looked at the ambulance and thought, ‘Gosh, this would be great,’” he said. “And so we came back and just really crammed the numbers with the budget and made sure that we could use funds from our budget and support that. And so we were able to do that, and it’s worked out really well.”

A future investment

Alsbury sees the purchase as an important investment in the future — especially as a means of preparing for a potential mass casualty incident. To him, making sure community members can get quick access to the hospital through the Emergency Medical Services system is a priority.

Clatsop County contracts with Medix, a private ambulance service owned by the Hillsboro-based Metro West Ambulance. Last summer, the Clatsop County Fire Defense Board voiced concerns over a lack of staffing and communication between Medix and the county’s fire departments, raising questions about impacts on patient care.

Since September, the parties have been working to address those concerns.

At one point last year, Medix only had enough full-time employees to cover about half of its shifts, leaving it to rely on overtime hours to fill the gaps. Now, the ambulance service is fully staffed — and as a result, the service is seeing a fraction of the open shifts, said General Manager Thomas Krokoski.

Medix has also been working with local fire departments to increase radio communications. Alsbury said the Warrenton Fire Department has seen significant improvements in response times over the last several months, and officials are also more consistently seeing paramedics responding to calls, rather than emergency medical technicians.

“I think we’re getting to a point where the crews can communicate better,” said Jonathon Brown, the department’s division chief of emergency medical service operations. “Our crews might get there and call Medix and say, ‘Hey, by the way, this is what we really have.’ Medix is getting better at canceling us if they don’t need us — that’s happening more often now. So there’s not really these two separate teams trying to do the same job. It’s really starting to feel more like a partnership.”

Nevertheless, there are broader vulnerabilities in the county’s EMS system that Brown said shouldn’t be ignored.

Historically, fire departments like Warrenton’s have been highly dependent on volunteers. At the same time, they’ve evolved to do far more than fight fires — including prevention and emergency medical response. Those responsibilities didn’t get any easier with a nationwide paramedic shortage spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“You can be the most prepared agency in the world, and have 10 ambulances on, and when that 11th call drops, there’s just nobody for it,” Brown said. “And that happens to all of us, and so again, one of those vulnerabilities is just, do we have the ability to pick up that slack?”

Brown said the fire department’s relationships with partner agencies, including Medix and other fire departments, are highly dynamic. Any additional resources the department can bring to the table can benefit the whole system — not just Warrenton.

“We could find ourselves in a situation where all of our resources were overtapped, and so if a (mass casualty incident) was ever declared, then it’s kind of an all hands on deck. And this gave us the opportunity to have some resilience within our own department to help mitigate that,” Brown said.

Next steps

For the last few months, the Warrenton Fire Department has been working to get its new vehicle ready for the road. Alsbury recalls spending three weeks stripping the old vinyl off the vehicle — white, with red and blue striping — before wrapping it in a new red hue to match the rest of the fire engine fleet.

The vehicle isn’t technically an ambulance yet, though.

“It looks like an ambulance, it smells like an ambulance, but for the sake of how we’re using it, it would be considered a transport-capable rescue, because we are not licensed as an ambulance company,” Brown said.

The department has two other rescue vehicles, which it can use for transporting patients and offering privacy. For the time being, the new vehicle will be used in a similar way. Getting the vehicle licensed as an ambulance, however, would require the department to check other boxes, like attaining reporting software, a mobile laboratory license and meeting certain security requirements.

The department would also need additional trained staff before moving forward on licensing.

“Having the staff on standby, that’s the next big piece,” Alsbury said.

Warrenton isn’t the first fire department in the region to purchase its own ambulance. The Seaside Fire Department, which has a licensed ambulance, has an agreement with Medix to assist with overflow from the county’s 911 system. Krokoski said initially, when Medix was understaffed last year, that ambulance responded to just under 20 calls a month. Now that the company is fully staffed, that number has dwindled. Krokoski said he’s supportive of the Warrenton Fire Department’s investment in new equipment, but he doesn’t see a need for a contract with a second fire department at this time.

Looking ahead, Alsbury said the fire department will be meeting with the Warrenton City Commission in May to seek direction on next steps. If fire officials get the go-ahead to pursue licensing, the process would likely take around a year.

“We want to, if it’s available, offer all of the available services, but it’s not our intent to become an ambulance service — that’s not what we’re looking to do,” Brown said. “If we have a licensed transport-capable ambulance, that’s a fantastic benefit to the city, but we’re not looking to become a transport service.”

This story has been corrected. An earlier version had an incorrect price paid for the ambulance.

The Astorian regrets the error.