It snowed the other day. Not nearly as much as the weather guessers said it might, but enough for me to use my snow blower. Which come to think of it, is anything more than can be cleared with a broom. I’m not a kid and I responded to enough middle aged or older men lying face down in a snow bank calls to appreciate the labor saving virtues of the snow blower. It’s the best I can do until Mrs. EMS Artifact can move a clime where you get funny looks if you go into Home Depot and ask where they keep the snow blower parts.

As I was walking along behind the snow blower my mind started to wander a bit and I started reminiscing about the many years when a snow storm was an opportunity to make money by working extra shifts. Snow overtime could be pretty easy money, or it could be a tough way to make a living. Which is what I was going to write the post about, but having the attention span of a gold fish, my mind wandered to the logistics of getting a “snow truck” in service.

Which brought me to today’s post.

For the entirety of my career at Sorta Big City EMS, our fleet of back up ambulances was a collection of unloved trucks. I once told our big boss that they were all “war weary” and unsuitable for use. Since he had no EMS experience and like many of our managers over the years, couldn’t even figure out how to open the doors on the compartment, my comments were ignored.

Like every EMS system I’ve seen, big or small, the back up, spare, reserve, what ever they are called, ambulances are trucks that have seen better days. EMS is about the hardest service a vehicle can be put too. It was worse early on in my career and was measurably better when I retired. That was due to a combination of better construction of the truck portion of the ambulances, better maintenance facilities and technicians that were better trained and for the most part wanted to do their job. A smaller portion of that was due to some level of accountability on the part of the EMS crews.

Back to snow trucks. Snow trucks, like all “extra” units, came from the fleet of back up ambulances. The problem with that, for most of my career, was that not only were those vehicles used when front line ambulances were out of service for mechanical or other reasons, they often served as a source of spare parts and even medical gear.

Back before we had supply services available 24 hours a day, if a piece of medical equipment broke, we either had to do without out or procure a replacement. Our options were few, so what usually happened was a put upon supervisor would open the garage where the back up fleet was stored. Then we’d scrounge around for whatever we needed to get back in service. I can attest that it wasn’t just medical equipment either.

More than once, when an outside mirror went huckle, buckle, bean stock into the night, a replacement was removed from an out of service ambulance.

Some of the EMTs who were on good terms with the mechanics had a stash of spare parts in a locker at their station.

No one every wanted to turn on their regular ambulance for one of the tired old back up ambulances. If you’ve ever worked in EMS, you no doubt know exactly what I mean and likely had similar experiences.

One of the things that successive management teams failed to do was have enough equipped back up ambulances for use in the event of an emergency. Which led to all sorts of fun times when called in to staff an extra unit.

For many years, finding a back up ambulance that actually ran could be an adventure. One fine summer day, our air conditioning gave up the ghost and we went in to the maintenance garage to see if it could be fixed. Good luck with that. There were three other ambulances ahead of us and our options  were go back in service in the same hot truck or take one of the stellar fleet of back up ambulances. We opted for the latter.

At the time, some genius in management had decided that the answer to midnight pilfering of ambulances was to decree that every one of them had to be emptied of all medical equipment.

Which meant that my partner and I had to remove every piece of gear from out broken ambulance and put it in the back up ambulance.

Which, even with a supervisor asking us every 30 seconds if we were “ready to go” yet, took an hour.

Finally, we got everything in place, drove out the garage, turned left, and stalled. Nothing we could do would get that pig to run and we had to call a tow truck.

To tow us 100 feet back to the garage.

Where we found another sturdy EMS steed and went through the process all over again.

That truck lasted an entire hour before it too lost it’s air conditioning.

Back to the garage again, for our fourth truck of the shift.

I forget what tragedy befell it, but once again we went back to the garage in search of an ambulance that worked.

Which turned out to be our now repaired regular ambulance.

After we swapped all of the equipment back again, it was time for shift change.

Six hours out of an eight hour shift spent swapping equipment between trucks.

Ahh, the golden era of EMS.

I so hated working in back up ambulances that one winter weekend end when the hose that fed the front heater core ruptured. Having no mechanics available it looked like we’d have to shift into a back up. “No way.”, I said. What I did was take out my trusty trauma sheers and Leatherman. I removed the return hose, attached it to the outlet for the hot water and ran with no front heat the entire weekend. The good news was that the gas engines in those old ambulances ran so hot that we had plenty of heat up front.

True story.

Then there was the time my partner and I replaced a broken (not worn) rear brake drum. We robbed a good one from an ambulance that was awaiting a new engine and installed it on our ambulance. That time there was a mechanic on duty, but he was too busy to do the repair. So, he pointed to his tool box and said, “You two know about as much about fixing these things as I do.” Which we did.

During that field expedient repair, a supervisor walked in, looked at us, shook his head and left.

But, we didn’t have to change into a back up ambulance.

Just like rental cars, back up ambulances are loved by no one.

I’ll leave you with this. I loved Adam 12 as a kid. Truth is, I still watch it when I can. There was an episode called “The Beast” in which Reed and Malloy’s regular unit is out of service so they have to work in a spare cruiser. When I saw it as a kid, I thought it was funny because I spent much of my “yout” working on cars and trucks.

It wasn’t until years later, well into my EMS career that came to appreciate the humor and irony of that episode. EMS, police, fire, it’s all the same. No one loves their back up vehicles.

Herewith “The Beast”, or at least the parts of it that relate to the car itself.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/9UwyqRLmkyQ[/youtube]