Bags are piled on top of lockers in the garage of the Anna Resque Squad building due to limited storage space.
Charlotte Caldwell | Sidney Daily News
The Anna Rescue Squad’s meeting room/sleeping quarters. A Murphy bed sits in the left corner.
Charlotte Caldwell | Sidney Daily News
The Anna Rescue Squad’s meeting room/sleeping quarters.
Charlotte Caldwell | Sidney Daily News
The Anna Rescue Squad’s meeting room/sleeping quarters. A Murphy bed sits in the corner behind a room divider panel.
Charlotte Caldwell | Sidney Daily News
The stairs from the sleeping quarters/meeting room to the garage where the ambulances are.
Charlotte Caldwell | Sidney Daily News
The Anna Rescue Squad’s living room/eating area with the kitchen and bathrooms to the left and the administrative office to the right.
Charlotte Caldwell | Sidney Daily News
ANNA — The Anna Rescue Squad will eventually seek a new station to replace the one at 203 S. Linden Ave. as the building no longer suits their needs.
Chief David Klopfenstein said land was purchased for the new station on County Road 25A near Amsterdam Road in July 2023. He said the possibility of a new building — which is estimated to cost $1.5 to $2 million — is still a few years away, as the plan is still in the early stages, and they are currently looking at renderings and different building ideas.
The chief said the squad’s current focus is the newly formed Northern Shelby County Joint Ambulance District — which is made up of Franklin, Dinsmore and Jackson townships and the villages inside them — before they address a new building and moving away from being a volunteer department.
“It’s a very small station,” Klopfenstein said of the current building, which was built in the 80s. “We are actually three stories, a three-story building, so the safety side of it, getting up in the middle of the night and coming down a bunch of stairs and going out is a safety concern. Plus, if we have mixed crews here, male and female, we don’t have the proper areas to have them separated.
”We’re very cramped… It’s just not very conducive to having a full-time department at this time,” he said.
A tour of the station showed a living room-type setup on the bottom floor with a kitchen, bathrooms and the administrative office adjoining it, which Klopfenstein said does not allow for privacy for administrative functions. The garage with two spots for ambulances is up some stairs on the next floor, and up more stairs on the top floor is a meeting room/makeshift sleeping quarters with two Murphy beds.
“We’ve got stuff stacked up everywhere because there’s just not enough room,” Klopfenstein said, referencing a pile of duffel bags on top of lockers in the garage. He said a room is used for storage at the Botkins station, which is one of their two other stations.
When they have a man and a woman on a shift at the same time, they are required to sleep in separate rooms, so Klopfenstein said one will sleep on a Murphy bed upstairs and the other will sleep on a recliner on the bottom level. They’re looking at having six bedrooms in the new build.
“We’re looking at having living quarters to where each person will have their own dorm room or separate room to be able to sleep in, so that it’s separated and they have their own privacy when they’re asleep, and then having the capabilities to host meetings and stuff like that,” Klopfenstein said.
“It was OK for volunteer status, not a big deal, because everybody’s running from home,” he said of the current setup. “They come in, run, call, leave. We use it for training stuff. That’s it. Well, now that we’re getting a bunch of people outside of our territory, and we’re trying to go full-time, it just doesn’t work.”
Other positives of a new station are that the land is centrally located, which would help response times, and they would have three spots for ambulances in the garage instead of two.
“I’m trying to make sure that as we look at that new station, we’re not handicapping ourselves for the future like we do here. We’re kind of stuck where we don’t have anywhere to go with it. So, trying to set up a station that is conducive for the now and the future so that if we need to add on eventually, it can go either way, and getting away from this three-tier kind of setup,” Klopfenstein said.
The department has between six and eight people who are paid for part-time work, the chief said. They can get anywhere from zero to eight calls per day and are up to around 400 calls so far this year. Last year, the department responded to just over 700 calls.
Reach editor Charlotte Caldwell at 937-538-4822 or by email at [email protected].
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