READING, Pa. \u2014 The next emergency call is never far away. And for 25 years, Reading Fire EMS has been answering those calls.<\/p>\n
2026 marks 25 years since emergency medical services officially came back under the Reading Fire Department. Today, that service looks very different.<\/p>\n
\u201cThroughout the year, we’ve been looking to put out information, kind of a then versus now, how our call volume has changed, how our staffing model has changed, and just some of the changes that have happened in the city since then,\u201d said Reading EMS Chief Mike Sninsky.<\/p>\n
And the numbers tell the story.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s evolved tremendously,\u201d said Lt. Trent Zulick. \u201cWe’ve gone from a little under 10,000 runs that first year to where there are over 20,000 runs. So, we’ve doubled the amount of calls that are being done here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lt. Zulick knows that history firsthand. He started on the very first day the department began operations in 2001.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy first job that day was actually to switch equipment from the old trucks onto the new trucks,\u201d Zulick recalled.<\/p>\n
And for everyone here, that work is personal.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou’re there for the worst day of their life,\u201d said paramedic and firefighter Ben Miller. \u201cBut being able to help them in some way, shape or form is the most rewarding part.\u201d<\/p>\n
They say every shift brings something different.<\/p>\n
\u201cNever see the same thing twice,\u201d said EMS Lt. Sean Danner. \u201cGreat variety of emergency calls that you don’t see outside of the City of Reading.\u201d<\/p>\n
And while the equipment, the staffing and even the stations have changed over the years, the mission remains the same.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’re doing our best to try to make some sort of difference, try to make it better, and we have a lot of people that push hard and work very hard to make that happen,\u201d Sninsky added.<\/p>\n
A quarter century of service, and a team already looking ahead to the next call and the next 25 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. \u2014 The next emergency call is never far away. And for 25 years, Reading Fire EMS…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":205787,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[90538,90537,26254,28,736,128,130,129,90536,6426,31990],"class_list":["post-205786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-ben-miller","tag-mike-sninsky","tag-paramedic","tag-pennsylvania","tag-reading","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-reading-ems-chief","tag-reading-fire-department","tag-trent-zulick"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}