Las Animas County quizzes ambulance district during licensing hearing

by Bill Knowles
TRINIDAD — Declaring that living in Las Animas County shouldn’t be a death sentence, Trinidad Ambulance District Chief Dan Moynihan faced a county commission trying to understand why it is difficult to get EMS to respond to E911 calls in some parts of eastern Las Animas County.
The question came up by commissioners as the ambulance service was seeking to renew its license to operate in the county.
“I called dispatch the other night and gave them the county road I was on and they told me, ‘You’re on your own.’  I mean we pay taxes too, so I don’t understand the difficulty,” Commission chair Mack Louden said.
The difficulty, according to Moynihan, is in the mapping. “We need better mapping, numbering, and signage,” he said.  “Dispatch uses Google Maps, but if the addressing isn’t there, then it gets difficult.”
The incident Louden was referring to happened near Kim, which has an ambulance barn and was closer, but it’s not part of the E911 system used in Trinidad.  Dispatch had to call Kim and give them the alert.  By then, according to Moynihan, crews from Trinidad should also have been dispatched to the location.  “We use multiple responders.  Sometimes Trinidad is closer and we get there first.  We have agreements with Kim for that.  As far as I can tell without having looked at the records of the incident, this might be a breakdown in communication.”
E911 is managed by the Trinidad Police Chief and the City of Trinidad.  However, according to Moynihan, “The ambulance district is offering the classes and training for free.”  This would put trained individuals who live in the county closer to possible medical emergencies that might arise in their areas.
In other business, the commissioners voted 3-0 to move applications for Special Use Permits (SUP) back to the planning department because letters of notification from Viaero Wireless to construct cell phone towers in three separate locations had not been sent out.
Colorado Crushers received approval on their bid to crush aggregate gravel for road projects by the county’s Road and bridge department.  The bid was for $288,000, up about $22,000 from October 2015 when similar bids had been requested.  However, the county is seeing savings on fuel costs with a bid on diesel by Alta Fuels coming in at $1.07 per gallon for 7,200 gallons of fuel, with the total contract worth $7,704.  Two years ago the county received a similar low bid on a contract for diesel fuel that totaled $22,000.