HeliService USA Brings Paramedics to Offshore Wind

Michael Tosi and Paul Russo of HeliService USA with Dr. Kenneth Williams discuss their offshore wind air ambulance service and paramedic hoist rescues. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Episode Transcript Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow. 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 servic