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Welcome back to the Daily PFAV. This is episode 127. For Sunday, September 9th, 2018, it's 12.50 here on the East Coast and I have been spending the morning getting ready for a possible FEMA hurricane deployment down to either North or South Carolina in preparation for Hurricane Florence, which looks like it's going to hit the East Coast of the United States sometime, probably around Thursday, if she give her take a few hours. And so let me tell you why I'm involved with that and why I might get deployed for that.
So after Hurricane Katrina, and we all remember how devastating that was for New Orleans, the federal government and FEMA pretty much got together and said we kind of can do a lot better with the way we respond to natural disasters. And so FEMA gave the ground ambulance contract to the country's largest ambulance service, which is AMR, American medical response. And they are literally all over the country. They used to actually have an ambulance base here in Pittsburgh, but they don't anymore.
But nevertheless, they have a tremendous fleet of literally thousands of ambulances that are all over the country. FEMA gives AMR this contract and then AMR divvied that contract up and offered them out to up other ambulance services in the country to help reinforce a FEMA deployment. And so I got us one of those contracts. Oh geez, maybe it's got to be close to almost nine years ago, eight or nine years ago, I think.
And so now White Okey MS is on the list for FEMA deployments as part of their national disaster response team. And so a number of years ago, the first, well, the very first FEMA deployment I went on was 9-11 for Flight 93 in Shanksville in 2001. But in regards to this specific ambulance contract, the first one I went on was Hurricane Irene up in New York a number of years ago. And then we got deployed for Hurricane Sandy the following, I think it was the following year or maybe two years after that.
And then last year, there were actually three FEMA deployments that we got activated for, but unfortunately we could not go on any of them because of a number of business-related issues at the ambulance service. And so about 36 hours ago, I got notified through FEMA and AMR that they were tracking the storm and that all indications were it was going to make landfall on the East Coast midweek and to start getting ready. And this morning when I got my FEMA daily briefing, again, every weather model is showing it's going to hit somewhere like mid-Carolina's probably on Thursday as a category for Hurricane, which is going to be horrible for that part of the country for numbers of reasons. And so I fully anticipate, I mean, from what I read FEMA is already deploying their advanced teams down to Fort Bragg as a staging area.
And they are South, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina have all declared states of emergency, South Carolina this morning or this afternoon at noon began some general medical evacuations and they anticipate that tomorrow morning, Monday, is when the coastal evacuations are going to begin. So all indications are that deployment for this thing is imminent. And so I've been spending the morning doing laundry getting ready for this because when the deployment notice comes, literally, we will have less than one hour to crew up with the ambulance. I will go.
I'm going to take two other guys with me from the ambulance service and off we go down for this deployment. Again, provided that we get the final order to deploy, which has not been issued just yet. So I did grab my go bag, which is packed year round. It's a green duffel bag.
And I posted what I thought was a funny picture on my Twitter and on my Instagram. I'm a food saver junkie, that little self-sealing vacuum seal machine. And so if you look at the picture six years ago, I made my own MREs that have like suit packets and candy bars and a coffee and a creamer and a salt and pepper and some candy and some granola bars in there. I vacuum sealed them and threw them in that bag and I've never opened them in six years.
But so those are going with me. I also shrink wrapped on my underwear, socks, t-shirts, everything I need. I got some general survival equipment in there, a little jet boil, which is like a camping stove, which allows me to heat up super water for coffee without having to make a fire in the middle of the woods. So that's already, but I'm probably going to go to the store today and pick up some other last minute items like some toiletries and stuff like that so that whenever we get the order to go, we're going to be ready to go and we will be out the door and we'll drive in the ambulance directly to wherever they tell us to go.
And we will be involved with probably transporting patients from hospitals close to the coast to hospitals more inland away from the immediate threats of flooding and wind. Just like we did in New York, I want to say I think in 36 hours up in New York, we evacuated something like 162 patients or something, some astronomically crazy number like that, just in our ambulance and literally just grabbing people, putting them in the back of the truck and going and taking them to shelters and stuff like that. Plus, we also run the risk of having to do some 911 calls while we're down there, which we could get dispatched for as well. So it's going to be two paramedics and an EMT that go and should be pretty interesting here in the next few days.
So I will keep everyone posted on this. I anticipate this evening getting another briefing from FEMA and AMR. So I'm just going to leave it right there for right now. 412-701-4323 is my show.
Call and number paulfalevolitopodcast.com. Thanks for listening.