A dozen employees are working through the pandemic on the assembly floor of First Line Tech in Fredericksburg, Virginia. They're seeing nursing homes around the country overwhelmed by COVID-19 infections, and racing to provide a way for fire departments to evacuate the elderly safely and quickly.
"We took an old school bus and designed a kit that can go right inside of it to convert it over and handle six, 12, 18 patients," First Line Tech CEO Amit Kapoor said. "The idea for Ambubus came up after [Hurricane] Katrina where a lot of issues during Katrina was evacuating our nursing homes and hospitals. There weren’t enough ambulances available. So it was practical to convert school buses." The "AmbuBus" kit is a metal frame, like an "erector set" that allows first responders to convert most buses into an emergency evacuation transport within two hours.