LifeFlight Making Move To Chillicothe

LifeFlight Eagle has signed a letter of intent with the city of Chillicothe to relocate its north central Missouri base to the Chillicothe Airport.
LifeFlight and the city of Chillicothe will now finalize a lease agreement before breaking ground on a new hangar and crew quarters that the city will build at the airport. LifeFlight Eagle CEO Roxanne Shanks said the move would likely take place sometime this fall.
“After the flood at the Trenton Airport in 2014, we began exploring options with the city of Trenton and surrounding areas to move our helicopter and crew to a location that would allow us to better fulfill our mission by eliminating the challenges we currently face with flooding and fog,” Ms. Shanks said. “The Chillicothe Airport emerged as the place that would enable us to best serve the needs of families in the entire north central Missouri region.”
The flood, which occurred in September 2014, caused extensive damage at the airport and forced LifeFlight out of its crew quarters for 10 weeks while repairs were made.
“We couldn’t allow that to happen again because of how negatively it impacted our ability to respond to the emergency needs of the community,” said Jeff Willhite, LifeFlight Eagle’s vice president of program operations. “Barring some sort of federal assistance that would have allowed the city to build a levy around the airport, we knew it was not a good long-term option.”
Willhite said that LifeFlight Eagle’s original 10-year lease with the city of Trenton expired in June 2015. The program signed a one-year extension while it continued to identify alternative locations in Trenton and the surrounding area in earnest.
“We certainly did not want to make a snap decision,” Willhite said. “We wanted to evaluate all the options to ensure we put our program in the best place to respond to emergency calls when needed.”
He praised the Trenton city staff, who he said explored several options to prevent future flooding at the airport and proposed alternative locations in Trenton.
“In the end, we made the decision that provided the best opportunities to serve the needs of the entire region,” Willhite said.
Trenton and the surrounding communities will see little negative impact from the program’s move, according to Matt Daugherty, director of business development at LifeFlight Eagle.
“We want to reassure families in Trenton and the surrounding communities that we are not abandoning them,” said Daughterty, who oversees LifeFlight Eagle’s membership program and community relations. “We will continue to be involved in Trenton community events and, of course, continue to serve the emergency transport needs of the community.”
Daugherty said that LifeFlight Eagle will be working with Wright Memorial Hospital, Grundy County EMS, dispatchers and other emergency responders to expand early launch protocols and other processes to maintain, if not improve, response times to the community.
He said the program expects to be able to respond to more requests for emergency transport in Trenton because the new location would not suffer some of the same localized fog that LifeFlight experiences at its current base and would provide the needed weather reporting information to quickly determine suitability for flight.
LifeFlight Eagle opened its base in Trenton in 2005.