Beatty Ambulance sees steady increase in calls

The few, the brave, the weary. Those words could describe members of the Beatty Volunteer Ambulance Service in these times. In the middle of the night, in the middle of a meal, in the middle of just about anything, the pager will go off, and volunteers must hustle to respond to anything from a ground-level fall to a highway accident, to a threatened suicide.

The service has seen a steady increase in call-outs each year for the last several years, partly because they have been handling calls not only for Beatty, but for Amargosa Valley as well. They are also sometimes called upon to assist with calls from Death Valley and from Esmeralda County.

Beatty coordinator Allison Henderson says that the number of calls this year is up 17 so far over the same period last year, and it has been particularly hectic lately.

The volunteersm three full-timers and six part-timers, responded to 58 calls in the month of April, half of those crammed into the last week of the month. Mark Henderson reported that they had 21 or 22 calls in a four-day period. Allison says that there has been an increase in the number of calls involving drugs and alcohol.

The Hendersons have been on the ambulance service for decades, and both say they’ve never been so busy.

“If it’s this busy now, and we’re told to stay home, I do not look forward to seeing what will happen when everything opens back up,” says Allison.

Besides responding to motor vehicle accidents for many miles of highway north, west, and south of Beatty, the service regularly transports patients to Desert View Hospital in Pahrump, and Mark says there seems to have been an increase in reckless driving during the lockdown.

“It seems that they are in a hurry a lot more than before the shutdown. I personally saw three vehicles passing on a blind curve on a double yellow line. Even in the ambulances I had to pull over to keep from getting into a head-on.” He reports that drivers would pass the ambulance as if it were standing still.

The volunteers have to be particularly meticulous in their use of personal protective equipment, such as masks and gloves, in the face of the pandemic.

“We treat sick people as if they have COVID-19,” says Allison. “We can’t take the chance, because we don’t know. Our risks are high, because we don’t know if they have been exposed or not.”

Allison says that they have been working closely with the Nye County Department of Emergency Management, and that they have a live conference call for COVID-19 with Director Scott Lewis every Monday.

Richard Stephens is a freelance reporter living in Beatty.