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By NOAH WORTHAM | Managing Editor

ALABASTER – With 2025 in full swing, the Alabaster Fire Department has officially begun offering ambulance transport thanks to two years of planning and help from Shelby County officials.

As of Jan. 6, the Alabaster Fire Department has already transported 27 individuals through its new ambulance transport service which officially launched at 7 a.m. on Jan. 1.

“The new service is the culmination of over two years of planning, staffing, budgeting and partnership,” read an official Facebook post by the city of Alabaster. “We are excited to provide this service to our citizens and are appreciative to the mayor and City Council for supporting this much needed service.”

The new ambulatory service program was made possible by Shelby County, which provided the capital to pay for transport vehicles for both the Alabaster Fire Department and Pelham Fire Department. In return, both municipalities agreed to provide staffing, personnel and to purchase equipment.

“This has been a multi-year process we’ve been working on,” Alabaster Fire Chief Tim Love said. “Throughout this past year, (we’ve been) doing the hiring and the training and the changeovers getting ready for it. And so far, it seems like it’s working really well.”

With the new ambulatory service fully operational, Love said response times are tremendously better now that the city can offer in-house services

“Before, we had paramedics (and) we had (Advance Life Support) engines but we were having to wait on a private service and they may be tied up,” Love said. “Now, one of our units is either going to go with them or, if they get somewhere and a call escalates, they can call them really quickly (and) they’re right here in the city.”

The Alabaster Fire Department has three ambulatory service vehicles in total with two that are fully-staffed and operated 24/7. The department increased its staffing by 10 positions over the past year, including a manager and nine firefighter paramedic positions to put the program into service for 2025.

The build time for the new fire engines took two years to complete which provided the fire department with ample time to prepare the services for their launch. During that time, the department reached out to surrounding municipalities who had already deployed ambulance services and asked them about their experiences to better prepare.

“We had that advantage to talk to surrounding municipalities and find out what we could do better, and so we set up our system based off of that,” Love said.

The presence of the new ambulances will benefit more than just the residents of Alabaster and Pelham thanks to the combined efforts of the fire departments through shared mutual aid agreements.

As a result of mutual aid, when one department is dealing with a large-scale incident, other local departments will be able to deploy their own ambulances to immediately assist—further strengthening each city’s efforts and the amount of support offered to residents in need.

Now, as the city of Alabaster moves forward with its new ambulances transport service, the fire department will continue to monitor the program and make any necessary future adjustments.

“Each month we evaluate it, and we’re constantly going to upgrade,” Love said. “The whole plan was to get a full year of operational data, look and see if we need more personnel (and) what changes we needed to make. We let data drive the direction we need to go in, mainly so we can keep improving the service.”