Alabaster starts city ambulance service in 2025
By Barry Wise Smith
Photos by Neal Wagner
As of 7 a.m. on January 1, 2025, if you call for an ambulance in Alabaster, Alabaster Fire Department (AFD) personnel will respond to the call.
After two years of planning and work, Alabaster Fire Department took over Emergency Medical Services (EMS) in the city at the start of the year. With funding from the one-cent sales tax increase and help from Shelby County, Alabaster now has three ambulances to provide service to Alabaster residents. “A tremendous amount of planning has gone into getting us to this point,” says Alabaster Fire Chief Tim Love. “We feel strongly that we’ll be able to provide faster response times for our citizens. We are excited to finally see it happening.” AFD is aiming for response times of 15 minutes or less.
Initially, Alabaster, along with neighbors Pelham, Helena, and Calera, issued an RFP to see if continuing private ambulance service would work. “To provide the level of service we wanted, private ambulance service was too expensive, and we ultimately decided city service would be the best,” Love says. The three cities will continue to provide backup service through mutual and automatic aid agreements. “We have very robust mutual aid agreements with Helena and Pelham to help cover each other’s calls for fires,” Love continues. “We always respond for each other, and we’ll use the same approach with ambulances.”
Developing this new service didn’t just require planning but hiring nine new firefighter positions to ensure the ambulances would be fully staffed. AFD created an EMS division and promoted firefighter Calem Hicks to Captain and EMS officer to oversee the service. Hiring throughout the year in preparation for the service starting in January, AFD filled all the operational positions by the end of 2024.
“COVID crashed the EMS world,” Love says. “We had to change our hiring mentality. We now hire out of recruit school—we hire them young and train them.” In this vein, and through the city’s internship program with Thompson High School (THS), AFD hired Jacob Bonilla, a 2024 THS graduate and AFD intern, when he completed recruit school. Bonilla was already a licensed EMT having completed the EMT program at THS.
A strong partnership with Shelby County was also critical to the success of the project. Shelby County purchased three top-of-the-line ambulances for the city at a cost of $350,000 each. “This is part of the county’s partnership to improve EMS services for residents,” Love says. “It’s a huge investment in public safety and emergency medical services.”
Two ambulances—one at Station #1 and the other at Station #2—will be in service 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and a third ambulance will be on call available when needed. Each ambulance will have a driver, an EMT, and a paramedic. “We will have more staffed ambulances for Alabaster than ever before,” Love says. “The service to citizens should increase fivefold, and the response time will go down significantly.”
In addition to the new ambulances and personnel, AFD has done critical infrastructure improvements to accommodate the new service and staff, building a new warehouse at Station #2 with a lockdown room for EMS and work at the other stations. AFD staff did the bulk of the work to keep costs down. “We’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, not including personnel, to get this off the ground,” Love says.
And citizens aren’t the only ones who are excited to see the new service get going. Caleb Draper, an AFD paramedic/firefighter for 8 years, shares their excitement, “We get to stay with our patients all the way to the hospital while providing a top-notch level of care,” Draper says. “Our patients will see faster response times because we’ll always have an ambulance available in the city.” John Bessiere, a three-year AFD firefighter, Alabaster native, and 2020 THS graduate, agrees, “This is what is best for the department and for the citizens. Our trucks will stay with us all the time allowing us to provide a continuity of care to patients with better turn-around times.”
AFD Lieutenant Brent Conway is excited for the citizens. “We’re going to be able to provide better patient care and faster transport to the hospital,” he says. “These trucks are for Alabaster citizens, and we won’t’ have to wait anymore. It’s a big investment but so worth it for the people of Alabaster.”
“This will make emergency services in Alabaster and surrounding cities better than at any point in any previous year,” Love says. “It’s been a collaborative effort, and everyone has same goal in mind. We’re not through though; this is going to continue to grow, but this is a great first shot!”