4 | Heartland EMS
east of Cochran – before gaining another
911 contract to serve Wilkinson County,
which borders Bleckley on the north and is
home to another 10,000 people.
Another 911 contract – this time in
Wheeler County – followed, and subse-
quently business was augmented as Cheek
entered agreements to provide non-911 sup-
port services to other adjacent counties, and
it added another big client when he was in-
troduced to decision-makers at Southeast
Georgia Health System, a sprawling health-
care provider whose territory extends from
its headquarters in Brunswick across a six-
county swath in southeast Georgia.
At its present level of service, Heartland
includes its Cochran headquarters and seven
other dispatch centers and supports a staff
that’s swelled to 140 full- and part-time em-
ployees and includes 25 distinct squads that
can be dispatched between southMacon and
the Florida state line.
“Whenwe started out in Bleckley,” Cheek
says, “my wife and I were the corporate office
and we had two squads. As we added proj-
ects, we had to add the infrastructure to sup-
port them, so the company grew naturally as
the time passed. The more we worked with
neighboring counties, the more projects be-
came available to us and we took them on as
