Community Rallies Behind New Ambulance Service Facility As Lloyd Construction Delivers Ahead Of Schedule
When emergency strikes anywhere within 386 square miles of the central Black Hills region, Hill City Ambulance responds.
Its two fully equipped ambulances answer more than 300 calls for service per year. Two trained emergency medical personnel staff the ambulance 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year. Emergency medical personnel assess the injured and ill, provide necessary treatment including life-saving measures, and transport for additional care.
For years, the Hill City Fire District allowed Hill City Ambulance to rent space in its facility to operate. But, the fire department is expanding and needs the space, plus its building is located in a floodway, so it’s not feasible to expand.
That led to a community capital campaign to construct and equip a new facility, ultimately raising enough to support the more than $1.45 million building.
“It’s been so much fun to see the community come together for this common goal,” said Blake Gardner, superintendent of the Hill City School District, who also serves on the community’s economic development board.
“The amount of bake sales and Bingo and fundraisers has been awesome.”
Lloyd Construction was chosen through a competitive bidding process to build the new 5,000-square-foot facility, and construction began May 23, 2024.
“This is a generational building for this community, and we respect that,” said Donnie Hambek, Lloyd Companies’ director of project development
For Hambek, the project takes on personal significance.
A former EMT himself, his mother helped start the ambulance service in Spearfish, S.D. in 1978, and his brother, who still serves in Spearfish, became the state’s youngest certified EMT four years later.
“I’m aware of the unique challenges that volunteer EMTs experience,” he said. “It’s a different dynamic working with a volunteer service run by a board of directors, but it’s been a privilege for us to help bring this to the ambulance district.”
The building is a smaller project for Lloyd Construction but still brought some unique challenges.
“The soil is silty and compressive, meaning that it won’t bear the weight of the building, so we installed 75 Rammed Aggregate Piers (RAP) that support the building walls and floor slabs,” Hambek explained.
“The RAP’s are 24-inch diameter shafts drilled to a depth of the underlying bedrock between 8 feet and 13.5 feet deep with a drill mounted to an excavator. A second excavator with a compaction apparatus is used to compact engineered fill in lifts creating a stone column that provides the correct bearing capacity required to keep the building from settling.”
Superintendent Troy Williamson and the senior project manager Adam Pequette “have done an excellent job of beating the schedule and controlling costs,” Hambek said. “Our subcontractors also stepped up in a big way to support the project, thanks to the lifetime relationship we’ve fostered with them.”
While Lloyd has a completion deadline of April 15, the project is on track to be substantially complete by Feb. 1.
“We’re ahead of schedule by at least eight weeks and have worked very hard to remain close to the owners’ budget even though there were some large change orders that were necessary based on the site conditions,” Hambek said. “This is a small volunteer organization with a limited budget and challenging business conditions, so we’re glad we were able to work through these challenges to deliver for them.”
As the building has taken shape, “I can see the value it provides for our school, for our community and even for me as a citizen,” Gardner said. “We have students in our district who have taken EMT classes and volunteer. So the ambulance service and the district work together as part of the fabric of our community. From the concept to the groundbreaking to watching the building being constructed, it’s been a fun process for everyone in the community.”
