Clearwater has 24-hour ambulance coverage with two members at all times, municipal CAO Leslie Groulx reported to town council on Nov. 22.
However, quite often one ambulance car from Clearwater is located in Barriere when that community is without coverage.
If Clearwater has only one car available, then it is located in Little Fort, she said.
Clearwater is a Fox-designated community (meaning standby cars and varying shifts) but with every coverage call the station is put into a Kilo coverage pattern, which means best reasonable response.
It is the aim of Clearwater to be faster than 15 minutes but in the winter with poor roads the response can be up to 25 minutes
Barriere also is a Fox-based station, with an expected 90 second response time, but it has an Echo (10 hours shift, four days a week) member – its unit chief is full-time and at the station Tuesday – Friday, 8 a.m. – 6 p.m. In all other aspects Barriere is the same as Clearwater, other than Barriere has only one car.
Clearwater has not had a full-time unit chief since the mid to early 1990s.
In a perfect world either the Kilo (callout) car would do the coverage or Kilo would be called up to cover the Fox pattern to ensure Clearwater always has Fox level of coverage as much as possible, Groulx said.
The Clearwater CAO was responding to a copy of a letter from Barriere Mayor Mike Fennell that was discussed during a previous council meeting.
In the letter, which was to the Ambulance Paramedics of BC, Fennell asked the union to address the need for obtaining and retaining experienced, full-time paramedics within rural communities. With only one full-time position in Barriere, the pattern in that community is for ambulance paramedics to leave as soon as they have enough experience to get a job elsewhere.
