AMHERST — After being pressed into service 18 times in a four-hour span last weekend — including for one drunk man who went for a late-night dip in the Fort River — the town’s fire chief is once again sounding an alarm about his staff being stretched too thin.
What makes last weekend different, however, is the timing of the calls in the middle of winter instead of a usual uptick during warmer weather in the late spring and fall, said Fire Chief Walter “Tim” Nelson.
Town Manager Paul Bockelman told the Select Board Monday that what happened last weekend — the first in which students returned for the spring semester — is a concern.
“It was a weekend that was not unusual during the spring, it was unusual at this time of year,” Bockelman said.
The most extreme of the 18 calls occurred shortly after 2 a.m. when paramedics responded to a man walking on South East Street in subfreezing temperatures. Cold and wet, and possibly suffering from hypothermia in his drenched clothing, the man told paramedics that he had just swam in the Fort River. He was transported by ambulance to Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton at 2:14 a.m. for treatment.
Other calls between 11 p.m. Saturday and 2:55 a.m. Sunday involved many young people who were transported to hospitals so they could recover from their high levels of intoxication, Nelson said.
The fire chief said the intensity of medical calls precipitated by alcohol was unusual outside the late fall or early spring months, when warmer weather prompts the department to increase its typical weekend staffing of eight paramedics to as many as 13.
But such weekends do occur.
“We get these a couple of times a year,” Nelson said. “It’s something that happens, and it’s a perfect storm.”
The town gets funding to increase its staffing during busy times from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which Nelson can use at his discretion. The town, for example, will bring in additional staffing Sunday during and after the Super Bowl.
Many of the college-age individuals who needed help last weekend had too much to drink.
“They were just drunk. They were very drunk, very bad,” Nelson said.
To illustrate the impact of such activity on the department, Nelson said that a dozen times over the weekend a fire engine was used as a first response vehicle, rather than an ambulance, and five times an ambulance responded directly from the hospital to a location to treat a patient.
The weekend also necessitated nearly a dozen mutual aid responses from Northampton and Belchertown ambulances, with nine of these responses coming during that four-hour period.
Both the call and student force were summoned to duty, and Nelson, along with assistant chiefs Lindsay Stromgren and Jeffrey Olmstead, who also assisted the staff.
While no major injuries occurred — with one person needing treatment for an ankle injury and another for an arm injury — alcohol consumption is putting people at risk of more serious issues, Nelson said.
Nelson said he fears that alcohol, often mixed with drugs, could be a lethal combination.
“The scary part is we don’t know if they are doing drugs voluntarily or if they are being slipped drugs,” Nelson said.
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.
