Montgomery County Commissioners Court debates ambulance bus purchase

Millsaps said there are four other such vehicles in the region, including in Atascocita.

Millsaps said a few weeks ago the county office of emergency management had ordered the ambus for Atascocita to respond to a fire at a convalescent home in Willis, but it took too long to come.

“Sitting there waiting for an apparatus to come from another jurisdiction really irked me, and I started looking at the way we can get one of these similar county funding on this,” he said.

James Campbell, chief of emergency medical services for the county, said the purchase of the vehicle would prevent the need to take multiple other vehicles out of service for a large event. In the case that multiple vehicles are responding to an event, service in the rest of the county is significantly affected.

“Anytime that there's an event ... what we would define as a multicasualty casualty incident—an MCI—if we send 10 ambulances, for example, we staff 30 every day so that's a third of our staff that's on that one incident,” Campbell said. “So then we call in neighboring agencies to bring ambulances to run 911 calls while we focus our efforts on the MCI.”

If the ARPA approval goes through, the county would have the ambus by April 1.