Thousand Islands Rescue

Thousand Islands Emergency Rescue Service (TIERS), was conceived as a consolidation of emergency medical services (EMS), then offered by the Clayton and LaFargeville fire departments. Originally called Thousand Islands Emergency Medical Services, the name was changed to Thousand Islands Emergency Rescue Service when New York State requested that the name not include the word "medical".

Historically, volunteer fire department ambulances and Guilfoyle Ambulance Service of Watertown have provided the River communities’ EMS coverage. For many years, fire departments had experienced increasing difficulties recruiting Emergency Medical Technicians; employed volunteers could not afford to lose work time, and many with families could no longer make the hundreds of hours of sacrifice for the training required for medical certifications. Guilfoyle’s response time from Watertown was not life-saving in a medical emergency.

Early graphics ideas

The consolidation of medical specialties into regional centers also caused ambulance transports to be much more time consuming, and research findings indicated that a higher level of medical training for ambulance personnel was required. 

As fire chiefs sought ways to provide full-time ambulance service with the highest level of care possible, the Town of Clayton and Town of Orleans fire districts bridged part of the gap by joining to hire an advanced-level Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), to help cover weekday hours. Still, it fell to a few dedicated volunteers to cover the hundreds of medical emergencies that occurred nights and weekends.

Town officials focusing on public safety and economic development concerns joined the fire departments and fire districts to put together a group of concerned citizens to design a solution.

After two years and hundreds of hours of collaborative effort, the Thousand Islands Emergency Rescue Service, Inc. (TIERS) was founded. On January 1, 2003, at 12:01 AM, TIERS was in service providing fully staffed paramedic level emergency medical service to the Towns of Clayton and Orleans.

Our first quarters on Brooks Drive in Clayton. No garage meant that rigs ran all night in winter to stay warm.  

Full staffing of an ambulance means responding with a full crew as quickly as possible to a first call. TIERS provides a Paramedic--the highest level of pre-hospital care available--response to our communities for complicated and life-threatening medical emergencies. Fees were now charged for TIERS' services because payroll, medical supplies, and other administrative expenses had to be paid for by TIERS, instead of coming through from the volunteer fire departments.

Our other paid and dedicated volunteer staffs log thousands of hours of service yearly as drivers, and provide back-up as Certified First Responders and EMTs.

TIERS continues to enlarge its scope of service to the community, including regular visits to senior citizen facilities and community first-aid, CPR, and Automatic External Defibrillator (AED) training for area residents, including seasonal and year-round residents of many islands in our service area.

TIERS also operates a rescue trailer designed to be pulled by our own ATV, purchased in 2007, or by a snowmobile to accident scenes in terrain inaccessible to regular vehicles, and a bike team to respond quickly during crowded local happenings like Antique Boat Museum events, Cape Vincent's French Festival, fireworks displays and fairs (see our entire fleet here).

This dedication to service and to our neighbors was a big part of why the New York State Department of Health's Emergency Medical Services Bureau selected Thousand Islands Rescue as the New York State EMS Agency Of The Year for 2008.

In 2008,TIERS added several crucial elements:

• A second full-time Paramedic joined our staff 
• A specially-equipped "fly car" was added to our fleet, allowing a Paramedic to respond to calls for assistance from neighboring towns while still keeping a fully-staffed ambulance in service for our town's residents
• A new state-of-the-art radio system expanded our flexibility, capabilities and ability to communicate with other departments
• Overnight drivers became paid staff for greater accountability
• TIERS began "leasing" Advanced Life Support personnel to another area ambulance squad which experienced major difficulty in filling daytime positions; this arrangement last for about six months

2009 -- Long-time TIERS member Mark Davis was shot and killed by a patient while responding to a call in Cape Vincent as an EMT with The Cape Vincent Volunteer Fire Department. A huge funeral for the 25-year-old student paramedic drew people and apparatus from up and down the US and Canadian East Coasts, but thoughts of Mark hung over TIERS for the entire year. The start of what would become a many-year economic recession squeezed our budget and income and changed the plans for a TIERS-owned building on donated land.

On December 6, 2009, TIERS completed a long process by becoming certified to carry and use narcotic drugs on our ambulances and fly car. Narcotic drugs are used for controlling severe pain and other severe conditions. Until then, Guilfoyle Ambulance had to send a paramedic-level responder from Watertown to furnish narcotics.

In 2010, TIERS began leasing employees to Evans Mills Ambulance and later to the newly-established Town of Watertown Ambulance Service to address a shortage of ALS providers.

In 2011, Rolly Churchill took on the newly-created Executive Director position and Glenn Morrison became the Director of Operations. TIERS began operating a wheelchair-transport van gifted to us by River Hospital, switched to Wheeled Coach ambulances on heavier Type-I chassis, and began offering a "bunk-in" scholarship with in-station living quarters to a student in the Jefferson Community College Paramedic Program.