An update on the new Washington Emergency Medical Services unit was given at Tuesday’s city council meeting.

Fire Chief Brendan DeLong shared how the volunteer unit has been doing since the start of operations on July 9th. In the month of July they had 66 calls for service, and from August 1st-17th they’ve had 42 calls. DeLong explained that initially EMS was only going to respond to calls when an ambulance wasn’t available, but upon further discussion with the EMS committee and the county ambulance service they will now respond to all medical calls, “The reason being is because you cannot really decipher what is a true emergency and what is not. We don’t want to put that burden on our dispatchers, they already have enough to do, and when everyone calls in, everyone’s got an emergency, it’s an emergency to them. So we’ve decided to respond to everything. We are new so we are still learning skills, how we’re going to operate, but it has proved beneficial.”

The EMS unit is composed of about 28 volunteers with half of them being Washington firefighters and the other half as community members. Two volunteers are on call at all times, and they’ve been able to respond to every call received so far, which DeLong remarked as outstanding for 108 total calls. He also mentioned that they have a great working relationship with the ambulance service, from whom they’ve received a lot of assistance in starting up.