“We always plan for that what–if days.”
What–if days are happening more often for the Grand Island Fire Department, where Chief Cory Schmidt said they’re staffing the same number of ambulances a day as they were in 1982.
“Grand Island has grown by 20,000, has gotten quite a bit bigger. Our population's aged, a lot of things have changed but what hasn't changed is number of units that we have in service,” Schmidt said.
He said when there are more calls, they send an engine company.
“More and more, we're having to take an engine company out of service to run an ambulance, it's not very effective in the big picture.”
Or increasingly, they put people on hold.
“That means someone called 911 and we had no units that could handle their emergency 42 times,” Schmidt said.
42 times in the last year and a half, they've had to make someone wait until crews were free.