One Year Since Hastings Ambulance Service Transition

By: Megan Johnson - Email

Updated: Wed 9:37 PM, Mar 13, 2013

Ryan Cyboron and Joe Hermann say working for the City of Hastings gives them experience in fighting fire and in answering medical calls.

"We start our shift at 7 o'clock in the morning, check our ambulances, make sure they're ready to go, check our fire trucks, and then we're here for 24 hours," says Hermann, a firefighter/paramedic.

"The paramedics will switch on every shift, so I'll be on ambulance one day and the next day I'll be on the engine," says Cyboron, also a firefighter and paramedic.

Both of them started about a year ago when Hastings Fire and Rescue took on the city's ambulance service.

Fire officials say they made the switch without increasing the number of positions, but had to invest in equipment.

"We didn't have any ambulances previously, so we've added four ambulances and obviously all the equipment that an ambulance carries," says Firefighter/EMT Bruce Sandhal, a 13-year veteran of the department. "[It's a] pretty big capital expenditure just to get all that."

Sandhal says though things ended up going smoothly, it was a switch that worried some.

"There was some concern in the community and quite honestly there was some concern within the department too," he says.

Rural/Metro was providing ambulance service in the city and in areas outside of it before the transition. Sandhal says they still cover all of the city and places that fall in the Hastings Rural Fire District.

"We do ambulance response into their entire district," he says. "We also do a joint fire response with them into their district, so we were already going out into that area, but we go out a lot more now that we're doing the ambulance."

City officials estimated there would be a cost savings of about $62,000 a year by taking on ambulance service instead of contracting it, but fire officials say they won't have a total cost or savings figure until the city does their next budget.