HOMER – Banks County Fire/EMS is awaiting delivery of a new ambulance after the structural failure of one of its trucks.
Fire/EMS Chief Steve Nichols said one of the department’s spare med units has wear making it unfit for continued use for patient transport.
“Our spares have been running on, I guess you’d say, a wing and a prayer because they are units that were bought way back in the early 2000s,” said Banks County Commission Chairman Charles Turk. “They have both been good trucks, but our Freightliner ended up with a cracked frame, so there’s no fixing that.”
The other spares that still are in service also are not without issues.
“Even our International, we’ve had some electrical issues with it but hopefully that is fixed,” Turk said. “We do have a fairly reliable spare, but once you break a frame on the old Freightliner then you really do need to go ahead and get a new one.”
On a given day, Banks County staffs three ambulances (stationed in Hollingsworth, Homer and Banks Crossing), but in peak times has the personnel to put a fourth ambulance in service, meaning the county needs four trucks that can be ready on a moment’s notice.
Should one of those front-line units require maintenance or repair, a spare is needed. That is what expedited the new ambulance purchase.
The $186,426 purchase will come from proceeds of the county’s 2017 Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax.
“Since it was already designated to spend SPLOST money for that in 2021, if we go ahead and order it then it won’t be ready until the first part of 2021,” Turk said. “We really got ourselves to the point where we had to go ahead and buy it because we’ve got three that we’ve bought over the last several years and one of them has got a little over 100,000 miles and the rest of them are not too far behind it, so we’re trying to get them replaced before we absolutely have to.”
The new ambulance will be identical to the three purchased most recently in the county, standardizing the fleet.
“We’ll have four med units that are the exact everything, but just have a different year on them,” Turk said. “Everything matches – very uniform.”
The new truck will come from AEV, the manufacturer that made the other three.
“Currently we have two spares, even with the Freightliner out of service,” Nichols said. “We expect delivery of the new truck around the end of January. Until then, we hope for no major breakdowns.”
The new ambulance will replace a current full-time ambulance that would rotate down as a spare fourth truck.
Turk said the county could have purchased a cab and chassis for remount of the Freightliner box, but the current cost was not substantially less.
“For 40-something thousand dollars, you might as well just buy a whole new box and everything,” Turk said.
But the medical box on the retired Freightliner is not going anywhere. Officials are optimistic it can be remounted at some point, but at a lower cost than currently available.
“Hopefully when things slow down some, maybe we can find a better deal on a new frame and then remount that one on there – hopefully in the next year or two when the other ones start wearing out,” Turk said.
