Louisville's EMS director defends questions about practices and response times

No apologies needed, your EMS brethren agree wholeheartedly. The flycars (either BLS or ALS) are a valid concept ONLY if they are permitted to say to a caller - sorry, you don't need an ambulance - and leave. (Remember, flycars are just a reincarnation of Johnny and Roy, who did NOT arrive in an ambulance, and who occasionally did leave without transporting.) LMEMS seems to be incapable of trusting its folks to make that call - and even better, trusting its dispatch personnel to make that call, or at the least, putting some calls on "wait status" when they are busy so as not to use up all available ALS resources.

Other places manage to do it, why not us?

In regards to a mass casualty event in Metro, it would work. As it has been for the past 2 years I have been here the street personel will carry the service. We break our backs to keep this service running. Yes, it has cost us alot in the process, great employees have left, family's have been destroyed, but the street personel will keep this city running. Our utilization rate (the amount of time we are on runs) is around 92%, the national average is around 60% so yes we are overworked and understaffed, but we love our jobs, we love this city, and will continue to, as a coworker has so eloquintly put it "bust ours to save yours"