Station 95 is a "project" to assist with EMS coverage in the central region of Somerset County. The project is in effect from 1800-0600 on weekdays, and all weekend. The main municipalities that are covered for this project are Bridgewater, Somerville, and Manville. It is NOT a COVID relief system nor a temporary fix, but a manpower dispersion plan. Due to the staffing issues associated with retaining volunteers and EMTs, these high-traffic squads have been struggling to keep up to cover their own primary service areas and to fill the void for the surrounding agencies which are on this project. The concept with 95EMS is that the squads sign up for shifts when they have a crew in order to supply a minimum of 3 BLS units (at least 1 per squad) to take calls across the portfolio. When the calls are dispatched to 95, SCC indicates the municipality name and the primary squad that is responsible for that municipality. If that primary squad is on the 95 roster and available, they may take their own call. Otherwise, one of the following will occur:
- One of the on-call squads will assign themselves to the call.
- The tour chief, 95-Tango, will coordinate with SCC and/or the on-call squads to assign the squads to the assignment(s) based on the individual agency mutual aid plan orders, unit availability, etc. A line officer of an on-duty squad may also do this in place of 95-Tango as many of them are on the rotation to be in the Tango role and are familiar with the scheduling.
In the event that all of the primary BLS units become tied up, Bradley Gardens (39EMS) serves as a pseudo "4th" BLS unit and will assist as deemed necessary. In addition, second crews for the on-call agencies are scrambled from time to time and support the efforts of their duty crew. After that line of defense is infiltrated, the calls are either passed onto RWJ or to a non-95 agency as per the originating municipality's mutual aid plan.
95EMS has been used as a last resort option for any other Somerset County municipality requiring mutual aid where RWJ or Atlantic is not available. No, Bound Brook is not included. This can also be triggered when the municipal mutual aid plan indicates one or more individual squads who defer to 95 during the evenings/weekend.
As I had stated in another post with a small clerical error, there is a multicast in place, hopefully temporary, between 470 and
154 155. While almost all agencies on 95 use 470 for paging, Finderne is a straggler on VHF. As a result, the group tone goes out over 470, but Finderne's duty tone is triggered simultaneously on VHF so that they are part of the group. They may be moving to UHF as I have heard testing of their tones on 470- however, no confirmation on if and when that will occur.
