Nah, there are two Rural/Metros in Santa Clara County (SCC), 911 and interfacility transport (IFT). SCC EMS posted a memo on their website about this here.
I heard that Rural/Metro of Nothern California (their IFT division in SCC) now has some Kaiser contracts in the area (originally AMR had it). I heard about it at work and here, but I didn't see it on the news. If this is true though, it makes sense that they are hiring 50 EMTs then.
My partner and some of my co-workers claimed they applied there awhile back, got offered interviews, but when they found out it was IFT, they didn't bother continuing on. I think this was before they got the Kaiser contracts too.
I applied there hoping I could get a second job, or something that offers more pay and hours (ProTransport-1 limits us to only 40 hours/week). Their application only allowed me to send 1 file for my certs, 1 file for my resume, some information (mostly for creating an account), and that's about it. I haven't heard back.
Other than that, I haven't heard much else about it.
ALS IFT? To be honest, I didn't see that for some reason. I thought the company was already over saturated with Paramedics (was told that some ambulances had 2 paramedics and 1 emt). Oh well, it'll be cool to see.
No, not a half hour. No way. Not unless you're just blowing thru it and not bothering to read anything or watch the vids. I just started one to get a feel for the time frame, I did part 1 and 2 of ICS 100 and 45 min for those parts is a little fat but fairly close. I wont be able to knock these out in time. I wish I had known I needed these earlier, I wouldve gotten em taken care of.