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Construction Begins On Southeast Wichita EMS Station

Sedgwickcounty.org

A new Emergency Medical Service station is being built in southeast Wichita.

As KMUW’s Deborah Shaar reports, it’s the first of two new EMS posts that are coming to Sedgwick County.

The Southeast EMS station will be located near South Oliver and 47th Street. Construction on an EMS post in northeast Wichita is expected to begin next year.

The county’s Chief Financial Officer Chris Chronis says they have earmarked about $4 million for the two new stations.

"We are using excess money that has been collected in the EMS fund to pay the extraordinary non-recurring costs of building two new facilities to serve the EMS system," Chronis says.

The county is adding the new stations to help EMS keep up with call demand in growing areas of the community. The agency says during the past decade, EMS has experienced, on average, a 3 percent increase in overall call demand annually. Requests for emergency services and patient transports went up about 6 percent in 2015 compared to 2014.

The county is also adding four new full-time positions to staff the new Southeast EMS post.

Sedgwick County is holding a groundbreaking ceremony at 3 p.m. on Monday. EMS Post 16 is located at 5055 S. Oliver.

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Follow Deborah Shaar on Twitter @deborahshaar.

 
To contact KMUW News or to send in a news tip, reach us at news@kmuw.org.

 

Deborah joined the news team at KMUW in September 2014 as a news reporter. She spent more than a dozen years working in news at both public and commercial radio and television stations in Ohio, West Virginia and Detroit, Michigan. Before relocating to Wichita in 2013, Deborah taught news and broadcasting classes at Tarrant County College in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas area.