By James Buescher
Intelligencer Journal
Copyright 2007 Lancaster Newspapers, Inc.
COLUMBIA BOROUGH, Pa. — As a way of getting patients to the hospital more safely, Susquehanna Valley EMS will soon begin equipping its ambulances and emergency vehicles with security cameras that monitor what’s going on both inside and outside the cab.
“With this technology, it means that video playback can show us clearly what’s happened. And studies have shown that having the cameras in the vehicles ... makes ambulance drivers more cautious,” Merv Wertz, chief operations officer for Susquehanna Valley EMS, said Monday.
“These cameras can help to cause a reduction of accidents outside the ambulance ... and because the camera can also see inside the cab, it’s possible to tell what the driver was doing at the time of an accident,” he said.
With its education, training and maintenance center based in Columbia Borough, Susquehanna Valley EMS has 133 paid personnel and stations in Mount Joy, Columbia, Rohrerstown and Woodcrest Villa retirement community in Lancaster.
In December 2005, Susquehanna Valley EMS merged with Willow Street EMS, adding stations in Willow Street and Quarryville Borough, giving the ambulance company the largest coverage area in Lancaster County.
Wertz said, the ambulance company has 13 ambulances and four squad vehicles, totaling 17 emergency vehicles to receive cameras; the approximate cost of installing the cameras in the vehicles, Wertz said, “should be around $2,000 a unit.”
Based on existing programs in Dauphin and York Counties, the new ambulance initiative is being paid for via a 50-percent matching grant through the state’s Department of Health totaling $17,000, Wertz said.
“Most people know about and support security cameras in police cruisers, and this technology is just like that. These cameras ... are like something you’d see on the TV show ‘Cops,’ but with one significant difference,” Wertz said. “The camera systems used for ambulances are only activated by g-force sensitivity, so they only record events 10 seconds before and 10 seconds after an incident.
“The only problem is that, sometimes, something as simple as hitting a pothole can set the cameras off.”
Headquartered in San Diego, Calif., the cameras’ manufacturer, DriveCam, has claimed to reduce costs “by 30 to 90 percent in more than 70,000 commercial, government and consumer vehicles,” according to its Web site www.drivecam.com.
Wertz said the new cameras should be up and running in the ambulance company’s EMS fleet by January 2008.