Residents living in the Clark-Cowlitz Fire Rescue district can now expect shorter wait times for ambulance services now that the fire district will transport high priority patients.
Clark-Cowlitz Fire Rescue (CCFR) rang in the new year by launching Medic 21, a 24-hour ambulance transport service responding to high-priority cases. On Jan. 1 alone, Medic 21 responded to eight calls, CCFR Chief John Nohr said.
On Jan. 2, CCFR hosted a press conference to showcase the launch of the advanced life support ambulance transport service. The new service addresses the increased needs for faster ambulance response times as Clark County continues to grow.
“Those of you who’ve been around for a while know that Clark County has grown. We’ve gone from 250,000 people in 1992 to over 520,000 people today,” Nohr said. “We have seen significant growth in the Ridgefield area, but we still have ambulance response times that are similar to rural areas."
The new arrangement will cut down the response time, fire officials estimate.
“Based on the response times that were determined then, everything north of 179th Street has a 19 minutes and 59 seconds response time,” Nohr said. “They have to make it up here at 19:59, 90 percent of the time. Everything south of 179th is a 9 minute and 59 second response time.”
Thanks to a donation from the Cowlitz Indian Foundation, CCFR now has a full-time ambulance dedicated to serious calls. A second ambulance will arrive in 2026 as a reserve.
The new transport capabilities are anticipated to cut down the almost 20-minute response time to roughly 12 minutes throughout the CCFR district when available. The fire district covers the cities of Woodland, La Center, Ridgefield, the Cowlitz Tribe as well as unincorporated areas of Clark County.
“Clark-Cowlitz Fire Rescue feels that our residents are not being served well and asked for a 9:59 response time in our area due to the amount of growth,” Nohr said.
The new transport-capable ambulance marks the first major change to the Clark County EMS system in over 30 years.
While CCFR received its first ambulance in May, before it could operate as a 24-hour transport system, the EMS District 2 contract, which CCFR operates under, had to be amended to allow CCFR to provide its own transport system in addition to its existing contract with AMR, a private company. Nohr said for ambulance service times to improve under the previous contract, without CCFR’s services, ambulance service rates would have had to increase for everyone in EMS District 2.
CCFR took its first significant steps to arriving at this point in 2022 when voters approved an EMS levy to provide a paramedic at every station every day.
