Diamond Pet Foods Continues To Be Good Neighbor To City

Ripon Fire EMT, Chad Cheek, sterilizes ambulance.

Diamond Pet Foods plant in Ripon has proved to be a good neighbor to the Ripon Fire Department and its citizenry.

With over 180 employed, Diamond has provided the Ripon Fire Department an alternate way to sterilize their two emergency fire department ambulances after their return to the station after a call -- with the cleaning procedure taking only 15 minutes compared to the usual hour and 45 minutes.

Fire Chief Dennis Bitters had heard that Diamond incorporated an additional sterilizing component to help protect their employees in the wake of the pandemic and asked if they could help the District where the ambulances had to wait on critical calls until their ambulances had been sanitized. The emergency ambulances often respond to sometimes 10-15 calls for service a shift.

The pet food company had been using an electro-static process to apply disinfecting solutions to their high traffic areas. These areas include breakrooms, hallways, locker rooms, and control rooms. The advantage of using an electrostatic is that it helps the solution to migrate around to the hard-to-reach areas of each room.

“We are fortunate to have a company like Diamond with its scientific expertise,” Chief Bitters said. Their advanced testing abilities were able to give us the confidence we needed to significantly speed up the process of decontamination while ensuring excellent results.

Chief Bitters recalled one day recently there was not one of the normal 35 ambulances available in the county from Lodi, to Tracy, Stockton, and Ripon. Time taken in cleaning the ambulances is critical, he said.

Diamond General Manager Mark Ferguson said his company has been using a Clorox 360 chemical with its residual effects with its metastatic action when a room is fogged using negative and positive ions.

“We are using backpack sprayers and the fire department is using hand sprayers,’ Ferguson said.

Ripon Fire Department pioneered the first paramedic ambulance years ago in 1974, complete with radio contact to a Modesto hospital using its emergency telemetry for the benefit of their patients.