It’s a great thing that Bryan Whitfield Memorial Hospital has more than one ambulance. In fact they probably needed a very large truck to bring the 8,900 units of food to the Food Pantry on Monday. But instead, they loaded an ambulance and took that “emergency” to the Food Pantry.

“This was our first time doing a food drive of this magnitude,” said Mitchell Snipes, an EMS team member. All the teams made a big push in the last week of the drive.

The deadline to get all food items to the ambulance dock was four o’clock. All the team members were steadily counting when Albert Murdock, EMS, said “That’s it, time’s up!”

The end result was 11,671 units over a nine-week period brought to the Demopolis Food Pantry.

The hospital had broken into groups for the drive, making it into a contest.

The winning group was the Health Information Management team with 3,033 items donated. The winning team gets to have hamburgers cooked for them at the Freedom on the River Festival. But the biggest win is in knowing how many families will benefit from their work.