It's just more maneuverable. You don't have to worry about parking it and gaining access closer to the house."
The Chattanooga Fire Department is considering changing the way firefighters get to some calls.
Firefighters are asking the city for $150,000 in the 2015-216 budget to buy two "quick response vehicles" -- retrofitted Ford Explorers that will be filled with medical supplies and staffed by two firefighters.
Interim Fire Chief Chris Adams believes the vehicles can be a faster, cheaper way for firefighters to get to nonfire calls. Instead of sending a full crew in a lumbering fire truck, he'd like to send a pair of firefighters in a quick response vehicle to medical calls.
The two firefighters would stabilize the patient and provide initial medical care until an ambulance arrived, Adams said. The quick response vehicles would be lighter and faster than fire apparatus.
"It's just more maneuverable," he said. "You don't have to worry about parking it and gaining access closer to the house, because sometimes the driveways are very narrow and we have to park [the fire apparatus] a long way away and hike up to the house. This way we can gain access right to the patient."
About 40 percent of the fire department's 12,000 to 15,000 annual calls for service are medical calls, Adams added. If the budget request is approved, he hopes to put the two vehicles at stations in East Chattanooga and near Hamilton Place.
Those two stations -- Station 5 and Station 8 -- have a high volume of medical calls, he said. If the initial quick response vehicles work well, Adams would like to buy several more to cover the entire city.
If the City Council approves the funding, he expects to have the first two quick response vehicles on the streets within four or five months.
On average, the fire department takes five minutes and 26 seconds to arrive on scene after a call comes in, Adams said. Hamilton County EMS responds within eight or nine minutes, said Director Ken Wilkerson.
Wilkerson said that longer response time is in large part because Hamilton County EMS covers the entire county, not just the city.
"I cover the entire county with 14 ambulances," he said. "They have around 20 stations in just the city. So we respond together, and they provide the first response."
Often firefighters will be on scene for two or three minutes before EMS arrives, Wilkerson said. He thinks the quick response vehicles can be a boon, and added that many rural and volunteer departments already use them.
"All we're interested in is maintaining that care for the patient," he said. "They don't care if they get there in a fire engine or a utility vehicle. It's all about the patient."
The two firefighters who ride in the quick response vehicles will be pulled from each fire station's existing staff, Adams said. But each station will always have enough free firefighters to man a firetruck if a fire call were to come in while the quick response crew was out, he said.
The department has 411 sworn firefighters, and about 24 new cadets will graduate in September, Adams said, which will help offset the personnel shifts.
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