Mason City council approves lease for building to isolate ambulance crews

MASON CITY — The City Council in Mason City last night approved a lease agreement with Tierney Holdings for a building that would allow the city’s Fire Department to separate ambulance crews during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fire Chief Erik Bullinger says they’ve been looking at contingency plans to reduce the risk of any coronavirus exposure to the department’s employees.  “One of the best things we can do is try to isolate our personnel, and in doing so to physically isolate them we can put them in a different building. That’s actually included in the national strategy for pandemics that’s given to us from the National Homeland Security Council. The effort there is to reduce the cross-contamination. We’re in such close quarters here for 24 hours at a time, separating those is the best way to reduce that risk. We’re probably going to be operating at 30-50% of our personnel at the other facility, so that should help us out if we get COVID-19 at the station.”

Bullinger says the building is located across the street diagonally from the fire station at 221 5th Southwest.  “It’s bigger than what we need. We could put a lot more equipment in there than what we have space for. We’re actually going to think about putting a few pieces of our equipment that we’ve been kind of overcrowded in our station and relieve some of that pressure off here and put it in that building temporarily. We only have available space for four personnel though. We’re trying to work out a way to put in a fifth person, because that would be ideal for us, but we’re trying to work through that part.”

A fixed rent of $2500 per month will be paid, with the expense to be included as part of a request for assistance funding the city is applying for. If funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act is not available for this, general reserve funds would be used.