A New Ambulance Has Been Ordered
Written by Jeremy Zafran on 23 February 2021
One of Kahnawà:ke’s two ambulances that was involved in a “pretty significant accident” last month will be replaced by a new one. David Scott, Fire Chief, Kahnawake Fire Brigade:
“We’ve always run 2 ambulances for the community, so after the ambulance was in the accident and we were waiting for the decision of the insurance company, we immediately brought in a loaner ambulance to take its place, which is costing the Fire Brigade $125 a day.”
According to Scott, the ambulance that was transporting a patient to Anna Laberge Hospital in Chateauguay and involved in the January accident with another vehicle has been out of service ever since after suffering “pretty significant damage.”
“I think the frame actually was bent, but the laws have changed in Quebec where we used to only be able to keep an ambulance in service for 7 years or 200,000 km. They’ve changed that recently that an ambulance can stay in service as long as it keeps passing its inspections. So as you can imagine we don’t run like Urgences Sante or CETAM our ambulances are sitting in the bay in the warmth and they only go out and run when a call is needed, we don’t have a call volume like in the city. So, for us that was a good thing. as you can see with the cost of a new ambulance every 7 years it would have cost us almost a quarter million dollars to purchase a new ambulance. So now we can keep them in service longer maybe 10 years, maybe 11 years, 12 years.”
The new vehicle, a 2022-model Crestline Commander, is expected to be in service by July or August of this year:
“They’re telling us there’s a 5-month lead time so we’re looking July, hopefully August. If the old ambulance had not been a write-off and it could have been remounted the box to a new chassis, they would have only been able to get to that in November of 2022, that’s 22 months from now. So can you imagine renting an ambulance at $125 a day, just the rental alone would have cost us $60,000 to get to November of 2022. So we’re going with the new ambulance and the costs are not out of the ball park compared to a remount when you take into account the rental and we’ll be putting the new ambulance into service, top of the line.”
The Fire Chief says they have been relying on a command vehicle that substitutes as a 2nd response vehicle since January 18th. The cost of the new ambulance is $231,873.00. Less than $20,000.00 will come from the insurance claim; the remainder will come from contingency funds put aside by the KFB for such emergencies.
Until the new vehicle enters service the KFB will continue to operate a rented ambulance at a cost of $125 per day
