Show notes
Allen interviews Michael Tosi, Paul Russo, and Dr. Kenneth Williams, from HeliService USA about their Helicopter Emergency Medical Services (HEMS) offerings for offshore wind farms. As large offshore wind projects develop off the US east coast, the need for high-standard EMS operations has become critical. HeliService USA steps in to offer comprehensive EMS solutions, featuring a fully-equipped paramedic-level air ambulance service designed exclusively for offshore wind sites.
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall. As large offshore wind projects take shape off. The coast of Massachusetts and New York keeping technicians safe presents unique challenges that require innovative solutions. We are here at HeliService USA's Hangar in Rhode Island, discussing offshore wind operations, specifically emergency medical services and search and rescue capabilities.
Joining us today are three leaders in emergency response, Dr. Kenneth Williams, division director of EMS and Professor of Emergency Medicine at Brown University. Michael Tosi, founder and CEO of HeliService, USA, and Paul Russo, director of Operations at HeliService USA. Together we'll be discussing their collaboration to provide comprehensive emergency medical services and search and rescue operations for a US offshore wind.
Michael, let's start with you today. And thanks for the invite to come out. This is tremendous. Of
Michael Tosi: course. You're welcome. Thanks for coming. Thanks for spending the time,
Allen Hall: as always, when we come to HeliService. The facilities are immaculate, the aircraft are immaculate. You run a really high class operation, which is desperately needed for offshore wind in the United States, but now you're expanding into emergency services rather than just carrying technicians out to site and dropping 'em on the top of turbines, now you're looking out for their health and safety a lot more.
So what does offshore wind in the US involve in terms of EMS operations? It must throw a lot of hurdles at you. How do you even approach that problem?
Michael Tosi: Absolutely. Thanks for spending the time today. A thanks for coming out and I certainly appreciate the compliments. The first thing for us is always safety, and it starts with your facility, starts with making sure everything's immaculate before people get on your helicopters.
Regarding EMS and Emergency Medical Services offshore this has obviously been I wouldn't go as far as to a contentious topic, but it's been one that the industry knows there's some issues with. And knew that they're gonna need a solution for it. Of course, there's always budget challenges, but the biggest issue is you have folks offshore who are isolated who are it's almost like a town out there.
At any given time, there'll be a thousand, 1500, 2000 people. If you run the numbers with all the heavy lift vessels offshore. So at any given time, you're talking hundreds if not thousands of people, and they don't have an ambulance service. There is no ambulance service. Out there, there's, you don't just call 9 1 1 and have a ambulance show up.
Up to this point, they've been using the Coast Guard. To a limited degree, but the problem is the Coast Guard is also not an ambulance service. The Coast Guard serves the entire region of New England with one helicopter. They are out there for folks in the water. They're out there for sinking vessels.
They're out there for law enforcement. They have a lot of other responsibilities. They're not designed to be an ambulance service for several hundred, if not thousands of people offshore. So what we've done with this program is filled that need because, that obviously can manifest itself in all sorts of different ways.
Most of them not good if your ambulance service is not available. Developers have seen the need to have an ambulance service to bring folks back. Lord forbid there be any injury or medical conditions offshore. So that's that's how we got here.
Allen Hall: I didn't realize only one helicopter serving the whole sort of northeast corridor.
From the Coast Guard side. 'cause if you watch the news, anytime there's a severe storm, there's a boat that has sunk and people that need to be rescued and they're co constantly flying around trying to just do that. I didn't realize there's only one serving it. So offshore wind being 30, 40 miles off shore gets to be a real problem for the Coast Guard then?
Michael Tosi: Yeah, absolutely. And it's twofold. One, it's, they can't guarantee anything. They have one helicopter in Falmouth. For these projects up here in New England. The next one is all the way down to Atlantic City, and that one helicopter in Falmouth may be on the board of Canada searching for a lost kayaker.
I also part-time serving the International Guard. Every once in a while we'll back up the Coast Guard because they're all the way up in Northern Maine. And something would happen down on the island where I was at. And unfortunately we don't provide a guaranteed response posture, but if we were out, we would go look.
So that's pretty commonplace. And also they won't guarantee that they come because they may have something of higher acuity. Paul spent several years in the Coast Guard flying a few jayhawks and Yeah. He can speak to a little bit about how that prioritization works Yeah. And how they're covering lots of folks.
Paul Russo: Yeah. Yeah. So it's all priority, like Michael was saying, in terms of what the case may be. If you've got got a vessel cell that's sinking offshore, 200 miles offshore or something like that, then that'll take priority over somebody that may have a fracture. Or something like that on a wind turbine.
So the availability of the Coast Guard while they're, listen, I spent, 14 years doing search and rescue in the Coast Guard. I have the highest regard for my brother and my colleagues there. But they are they're busy and to rely on them as a sole source for evacuating your people. It's just not the solution.
If if you do indeed have a unfortunate injury offshore.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And building offshore wind turbines is complicated and there's a lot of heavy equipment, a lot of moving pieces, and a lot of people as it, it sounds like now, and we're in that building phase in the United States where there's a number of construction sites going on.
So there's a lot of people, technicians out there at the moment that don't have, maybe, don't have the coverage they think that they have. Correct.
Paul Russo: Correct.
Allen Hall: Okay. Wow, I didn't realize that. This brings in Dr. Williams on the EMS side. Because what HeliService is gonna provide is EMS services to those technicians that are offshore working on wind turbines.
You've been in the EMS world for a long time, and you probably have seen everything. What are some of the challenges though, of doing helicopter EMS work and making sure that they have a program here that meets the high standards that Rhode Island and the US requires?
Dr. Kenneth Williams: Thank you and thanks for inviting us to do this.
One of the things that we like to say in emergency medicine is that you've never seen everything. There are always circumstances or conditions that come up that, that are novel. And when I was asked to get involved in this project I saw it as an interesting challenge and an interesting opportunity.
In my past, I was medical director for. A regular medical helicopter service at the University of Massachusetts, which served both crash scenes and inter-hospital transfer, but not capable of doing this kind of work. And there's no regular medical helicopter service in the area that is capable of doing this both landing on some of the assets offshore.
In doing the hoist work the regular med flights and life flights are not equipped and not capable, not trained, don't have the aviation or the medical training to do this. Their aircraft are not equipped with the hoist. They may not be the right configuration or power to do this kind of work.
When Michael came to us at the Department of Health I happened to be sitting in the room. Because I'm also the state EMS medical director and it seemed like a good fit for me to participate and what we've put together in in very short timeframe and very efficiently with some great help from the whole team here is of paramedic level, fully staffed and fully equipped air ambulance that is limited to supporting the wind farm industry.
We're not competing. With the med flights and life flights, we're not gonna be going to a hospital to hospital or going to a crash on the highway. We're here just to support the wind farm industry and we've done extensive training with a group of paramedics and the group of flight engineer hoist operators that we have both day and night, and of acquired an extensive outfit of equipment that meets the Rhode Island standards for a paramedic ambulance.
So we have medications. We have a full cardiac monitor, we have oxygen, we have suction. All the things that we, you would get in a ground paramedic ambulance, we will have available for people out on the wind farm assets.
Allen Hall: Wow, that is huge. And a difficult task actually to do that. It was
Dr.