Crash ambulance back in service
The ambulance damaged in a crash last Friday is due to return to service today.
It was involved in a collision with a car at the junction of Rue Militaire and Les Sauvages and while the car sustained serious damage the ambulance escaped unscathed externally.
‘The damage is to the steering components,’ said St John Emergency Ambulance Service chief officer Mark Mapp.
Repair work was carried out by mechanics employed by Home Affairs.
‘They give a great service and turn around our maintenance really, really quickly. We’re lucky and appreciate what they do for us.’
Fortunately, crashes involving ambulances were rare, he said.
‘I think we respond to over 6,000 emergency calls a year and that doesn’t include our non-emergency fleet,’ he said.
‘And we have very few incidents.’
He was pleased that nobody was injured in this incident.
A police investigation is being carried out and Mr Mapp said that was expected to take several weeks. The service was cooperating fully.
St John has five emergency ambulances, but were it not for it having access to others owned by the St John charity, even one vehicle out of service could be an issue.
‘It will stress the system slightly,’ he said.
‘If we have a further breakdown this week, we’re down to three. If the St John charity didn’t have a fleet to support us, I suspect we would probably need a couple more additional frontline vehicles to give us that resilience.’
Most of the time the charity’s ambulances are used to provide first aid services at public events but when needed they are kitted out with the sort of equipment used by the emergency service.
So far this year there have been two occasions where all of the emergency ambulances and the service’s rapid response cars have been out at the same time, said Mr Mapp.
While not all of these might be committed, attending at the hospital for instance, if necessary there was a plan in place to use the charity fleet.
‘Once this year, we’ve gone into using all of our fleet and having the charitable fleet on standby as well, which is a positive because we’ve got that resilience.’
