The Ambulance Service of Tulcea County did not spend a single lei from the credit line opened by the Ministry of Health in 2019 for the facility from Tulcea to purchase lifeboats, so it will use boats with engines that should have been scrapped this tourist season as well. reports Agerpres.

Four years ago, the Ministry of Health approved a credit line worth 5 million lei for SAJ Tulcea to buy five boats, but the results of the auction were contested and the institution abandoned its intention to purchase.

“I have not spent a single lei from this line of credit. We started the reconstruction of the lifeboat, in the sense of modernization, and with our own funds we did everything we could to have another functional lifeboat, in the sense that we purchased two new engines,” the head of the district Ambulance Service told Agerpres Tulcea, Council Sichinsky.

Tulcha County Ambulance Service has 3 functional sloops, two of which are medical, one recently upgraded and likely to be operational next month.

“When we got these barges, a long time ago, the builder said that after a thousand hours of operation, the engines should be overhauled, and after two thousand hours of operation, they should be completely replaced. The ones we have and use now have nine to ten thousand hours of operation, which is, so to speak, five times more than the recycling rate. And why? Because we don’t have others,” says Radu Sicinski, head of the Tulcea ambulance service.

In the context of the beginning of the tourist season, he noted that helicopters from neighboring counties intervene to support patients: “In special situations, we also called for helicopter support, but at the same time we also have to go by water, because there are situations when a helicopter cannot help us because he doesn’t really have a place to land.”

Repairing a boat engine is expensive, he said, and the boat currently costs nearly three times as much as it did in 2019.