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ou’ve almost certainly seen them: those familiar orange, white and blue vehicles zipping to and from accident scenes. While you don’t want to be in a position to need them, Metro West ambulances are at the ready 24/7, waiting for the next 911 emergency call. Hillsboro-based MetroWest is a home-grown operation. In fact, the folks who run it like to say it’s the oldest continuous owner-operated ambulance service in Oregon.

Owner and President J.D. Fuiten says there’s a rich family history behind the ambulance firm as well. Fuiten’s father, James B., a World War II veteran, started the company.

“He graduated from mortuary college in about 1947 and did his apprenticeship in Lebanon,” says Fuiten. “He operated the ambulance and mortuary service there.” Fuiten’s father and mother moved to Forest Grove in 1953 and Forest Grove Ambulance was born.

A decade later, when James B. opened an ambulance service in Hillsboro, he changed the name to Fuiten Ambulance. In 1973, Metro West became the name when the elder Fuiten purchased Butler Ambulance and combined it with Fuiten Ambulance. During the early ’70s, a change in the industry was under way as the EMT program was starting up. That started a shift, recalls Fuiten, toward improved response times and better train-ing for ambulance personnel.

With the county population exploding, the company located ambulance stations in Cedar Hills, Tigard, Aloha and Tualatin to reduce response times to an ever-expanding population.

Fuiten sees the advantages of being an owner-operated ambulance service: sta-bility, family and consistency of service. Erin Miller, vice president of business development, seconds that: “We are truly an Oregon-based company, providing jobs and services and doing business in Oregon.”

According to Fuiten, 26 ambulances operate out of Metro West.

“We have two ambulances up in Vernonia. We have two ambulances asso-ciated with Oregon Health and Science University’s PANDA team. The balance of them are here in Washington County,” says Fuiten. The service area is the entire

county, with a few small carve-outs. The ambulance business is hardly dull, according to Fuiten. No two days are the same.

“From my personal perspective, we’ve been doing this for a great number of years. We have a contingency for extreme-ly high loads of volume. We probably have a trimming plan for slow days,” says Fuiten. “We examine our call volume by hour of the day and day of the week. We examine things like traffic patterns and travel times to get patients to the hospital.”

“I’m a retrospective evaluator and pat-tern follower because there is a pattern in our line of work,” says Fuiten. “We try to follow that pattern and match our supply and demand within reason while we’re still complying with the response-time standards the county has laid out for us.” In any given Metro West ambulance there will be two paramedics or an EMT and a paramedic; most ambulances have two paramedics. These men and women work 10- to 12-hour shifts. Ambulances respond to a wide range of emergencies. “The range is too large to describe,” says Fuiten. “It’s any medical emergency that the 911 system generates.” It could be a chlorine gas spill at a swimming pool or a large auto crash in the early morning

hours, he says.

A paramedic at Metro West will expe-rience a number of emergencies in any given week, but an ambulance can provide other services. Miller says they can trans-port someone’s mother or grandmother from hospice care so they can die at home. They may also take a patient from one hospital to the next for a procedure or transport them home after surgery. “There’s a lot of medical care, then there’s a lot of compassion care, where their interpersonal skills are called upon, not only for the patient but for the patient’s family,” says Miller.

A special breed is attracted to the ambulance field.

“I think the people who are drawn to this field like to work outside the box,” Miller insists. “They don’t necessarily want to be under the direction of a super-visor every day. They’re kind of cowboys in a way. They want to go out and do their thing under a set system of protocols and policies that they have to follow. They want to be able to go do that. I think it takes a really unique personality trait.” Paramedics and EMTs, Miller adds, “are very dynamic and interesting folks. If two days are the same, they grumble. That’s what they don’t want.”

A paramedic or an EMT may have to face particularly tragic calls, Miller explains.

“You have to have an internal process where you deal with it appropriately, and at the appropriate time, because you may not be able to internalize and really deal with the situation that’s tragic at that moment,” she says.

The economy has presented challenges for Metro West, says Fuiten.

“In being a family-operated business that’s been around since the early ’50s, we worked through the last major recession (early ’80s) and really didn’t see any downtown in our business — maybe a lit-tle leveling off.” These days, Fuiten is noticing that people don’t call 911 as often. They don’t visit hospitals for proce-dures as often as they once did. Fuiten also points out the rapidly-changing cost of fuel, noting that ambulances are on the road constantly.

Despite a challenge here and there, Fuiten maintains it’s satisfying working in the ambulance business.

“We just have the greatest job in the world,” he says.