By Bryan Basher
The Commercial Appeal
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — DeSoto County Emergency Medical Services is about to become the proud owner of a 16-foot-long, fully enclosed trailer.
But no one will ever live in it - and if things go well, it’ll never be used at all.
The trailer is being purchased with grant money from the Mississippi Department of Health as part of the City Readiness Initiative.
It will be stored at the EMA building in Nesbit and used only when a widespread medical emergency calls for it.
“It won’t be used to store any large amounts of vaccine or anything like that,” said Chris Olson, chief deputy director of DeSoto County EMS. “It’ll just be there and ready if we ever need to receive large amounts of vaccine or other medical materials that need to be distributed to lots of people at once.”
Giving examples of situations that might call for the use of the trailer, Olson mentioned a widespread swine flu pandemic or an anthrax outbreak.
“It’s something that we’ll be able to deploy easily to any of our pod sites like the DeSoto Civic Center,” he said. “Any place where we might be vaccinating a lot of people all at one time. Emergency Services sets all of that up, and this trailer will make it all much easier.”
The trailer, which measures 7 feet wide and 16 feet long, had a sale price of $4,799. All of that was covered by the federal grant money, so it didn’t cost DeSoto County taxpayers anything directly.
In addition to storing emergency stockpiles of vaccine, Olson said the trailer would hold emergency items such as traffic cones to help set up drive-through operations when necessary.
Of course, in a perfect world, it will stay parked in one spot forever.
“If the swine flu pandemic got severe enough - if it was a really bad pandemic - that’s when it would be used,” he said. “It would take something like that or a huge anthrax-type scare.
“Obviously, we hope we never have to deal with anything like that. So hopefully, this trailer will be basically brand new forever.”
Copyright 2009 The Commercial Appeal, Inc.