Marshall Helmberger
TOWER The city council here, on Monday, adopted a change in the method of staffing its ambulance service to help ensure that no emergency calls go without a response. The move, which is expected to sharply increase the service’s personnel costs, comes after the service had no EMTs available to respond to an emergency call from Scenic Rivers earlier this month.
The ambulance service has relied primarily on what’s known as an “all-call” system for years, under which all members of the department are subject to call at any time, but no members are specifically designated to respond at any particular time.