By Erin Geismar
The East Hampton Press
MONTAUK, N.Y. — In a worst-case scenario, it could take a Montauk person in medical distress almost an hour to be taken by ambulance to Southampton Hospital, but Ken Glogg, captain of the Montauk Ambulance Company, said that’s a rare situation that occurs only when there are not enough available volunteers in Montauk or nearby hamlets, and the ambulance has to come from as far away as Bridgehampton.
In fact, he told the Montauk Citizens Advisory Committee on Monday night, in the two years that area emergency service teams have used a mutual aid system, where a call is passed around through dispatches until a team responds, there have been 7,000 ambulance calls and only one, which happened in October, that has required a team to travel the full distance from Bridgehampton to Montauk for a run to the hospital.
The system works, he said, but the key issues that still need to be addressed are the number of “taxi rides” the ambulance volunteers provide to people who could have driven themselves to the hospital or a medical center, and a lack of volunteers.
Full story: Glogg estimates 20 percent of ambulance rides are unnecessary