Along State Road, the Union Fire Company is now home to a growing number of Bensalem Township’s most critical emergency vehicles.
During a ribbon-cutting on Wednesday, the Bensalem Rescue Squad, which has called this station home for the past year after six local volunteer fire companies consolidated, announced a second medic unit will be stationed there full-time.
“There’s gonna be a lot of development down in the Andalusia area in the next few years,” Thomas Topley, the executive director of the Bensalem Rescue Squad, said. “And we’re predicting increased call volumes down here, increased traffic that would delay our response times, and during weather emergencies, we always want to be in Andalusia anyway, so it seemed like the perfect match.”
Bill McVey, the director of Bensalem Police, said while Bensalem’s average 8-minute response time is well below state standards, peak times and traffic can put that in jeopardy.
“In any 911 emergency response, seconds matter, so minutes really matter,” McVey said. “Bensalem’s 21 square miles and we’re about 65,000 residents, but during the day, we hit about 250,000 people coming in our town for business, for pleasure, for whatever, just travel. So, we have a large volume of people in here during the day, so having us here during the day is critical for us.”
For now, the firehouse will be staffed from 8 a.m. until midnight, but the goal is to expand it 24/7.
For those who answer the call, they hope that being closer to where the need is will ultimately save lives.
“We train a lot and we prepare for a lot of emergencies,” Topley said. “But having ambulances staged throughout town really gives us advantage to utilize resources better and get the patients faster.”