Ambulance situation puts county residents at risk

Franklin County is over 70 miles long. The ambulance service maintains two ambulances, one in Eastpoint and one in Lanark Village. The only way to compensate for this lack of coverage is with the reliance on the fire departments to supply immediate life saving emergency care.

The nationwide recognized EMS emergency response time for life saving aid to be delivered to the critical patient is five minutes or less after the call for help. Obviously Franklin County's ambulance service operates within this time frame less than 50 percent on emergency calls. Our fire departments are at the patient’s side within five minutes or less on every call except for some of the far extremes of the county.

Only with the combination of County EMS and our fire departments is there any semblance of emergency medical care in the county. This is a bad situation, but we have had to accept it as the reality of living in Franklin County.

The Franklin County volunteer fire departments have purchased radios to monitor and communicate with Franklin County ambulances. These radios enable our fire departments to monitor the ambulances and communicate with them. While monitoring the county's ambulance service some disturbing and frightening practices have been discovered. We feel these practices are not known by the public or our government agencies. 

On a good day, when the Lanark ambulance is at its station, its response time to Alligator Point is over 25 minutes. If the Lanark ambulance is on another call then the Eastpoint ambulance's response time to Alligator Point is over an hour.

The same scenario exists on the other end of the county. If the Eastpoint ambulance is on a call, then it will take the Lanark ambulance over 45 minutes to reach St. George Island or Apalachicola.

Franklin County has a nursing home in Saint James, "Crooked River Health and Rehabilitation Center" and an assisted living facility in Carrabelle, "Harbor Breeze". On a regular basis; one, two or even three times in a 24-hour time period (our ambulances are on 24- hour shifts) the ambulance in Lanark is transporting patients from one of these two facilities to either Bay or Leon County.

In addition to these transports the Lanark ambulance is dispatched to Weems Memorial Hospital to transfer patients to Bay and Leon counties on a regular basis. These transports take an average of three hours. That's three to nine hours or more each day that there may be only one ambulance in Franklin County. If there should be an ambulance call during those transports, then there is no ambulance available for all of Franklin County.

This situation places every single person in Franklin County at risk and should be addressed and rectified. The obvious solution is to put another ambulance on duty in the county, increasing the ambulances to three on duty 24 hours a day. This is an emergency life-threatening situation which needs immediate correction and warrants emergency action by the Franklin County Board of County Commissioners.

Your Franklin County volunteer fire departments will urge our commissioners to take immediate action to correct this life threatening situation before someone dies needlessly. Please call your Commissioner and ask him or her to take the immediate steps to correct this problem.

The Franklin County United Fire Fighters Association encompasses five of the county’s six fire departments, assisting with training and grants, and representing the departments’ needs at the county level.