CINCINNATI, Ohio—When there’s a medical emergency, you might see ambulance EMS crews rushing to the scene.
- Mountain bikes equipped with everything paramedics need to help, are now being used at the Cincinnati Fire Department
- They have a team of about 15 EMS bikers, who take the bikes out during big, crowded events
- They’re planning to add to the team of mountain bikers early next year
But Cincinnati Fire Lieutenant Dan Coletta had to do all that— and ride a bike.
“We thought it’d be simple, you know how to do your job, you know how to do your job as a paramedic, you just hop on a bike and go...it’s definitely not that,” said Coletta.
He’s part of Cincinnati Fire’s brand-new Mountain Bike Unit —a team of bikers who are also paramedics.
“There was 40 hours of training total, going up and down steps, how to maybe ride the brakes,” said Coletta.
They’re sent out during big events, when there are big crowds —that a big ambulance would take a lot longer to get through.
“Just navigating through the streets or through the crowd on a big vehicle isn’t very safe,” said Kevin Uhl, EMS operations captain.
It’s the reason Captain Kevin Uhl, the man heading up the Mountain Bike Unit, says they’ve spent a year building up the training, equipment and funding for these $2,000 bikes.
And they plan to add more.
“Currently, we have a roster of 15 people who are trained and certified on the EMS Mountain Bike Unit and we hope to grow that early on in 2020,” said Uhl.
He says they’ll be able to do that with the funding from the Cincinnati Fire Foundation and overtime that these trained paramedics put in that turn these bikes into ambulances on two wheels.
“We’re out there more so to save lives,” said Uhl.
