June 22, 2019

Williamsburg Volunteer Fire Department

The purchase of a brand new car comes with a sense of pride and independency — the Williamsburg-Homewood Volunteer Fire division is experiencing that experience, times three.

“You can’t constantly rely on somebody else arriving at help, ” Kyle Bond, Williamsburg-Homewood Volunteer Fire Department, said. “This way, we’ve got our very own resources.”

Within department’s section last week, 103 William St., Williamsburg, Bond and others from the department admired the last of three purple, shiny improvements into the department’s fleet.

“It’s a large success for all of us, ” Bond, that has been with all the department for nine years, stated. “We haven’t had anything brand new in quite a while... We've some older equipment, and then we are simply trying to get updated — we’ve obtained three brand new vehicles, and therefore are getting rid of four. This May bring us up to eight vehicles total in our place.”

Two brand new pickup-style trucks allows the 15-person division to higher combat outlying problems in the department’s jurisdiction, such as for instance grass fires, Bond stated.

“The two pickups we simply bought from Osage County Fire District 3, that will be Melvern, ” Bond stated. “One of them is likely to be a grass [fire] vehicle, additionally the other you're going to be our health first responder and a grass truck.”

The crown jewel of this department’s additions, but is a little larger.

“It’s a-1, 200 gallon tanker, to haul water for construction fires, ” Bond stated. “We bought it in November. We got it off Ringgold, Pennsylvania, from a volunteer fire department.”

The inclusion for the tanker is essential, Bond said, given the department’s coverage location.

“We address 85 square kilometers, essentially the southwestern place of Franklin County, ” he said. “We didn’t have a tanker, so we relied on shared the aid of other departments. We don’t have any hydrants inside county.”

Phasing out other older vehicles used to fight grass fires and adding the tanker provides a host of advantages to the volunteers and residents, Thomas Winter, Franklin County emergency management coordinator, said.

“Their fire protection amount and their particular safety level will go with the acquisition regarding the brand new gear, ” Winter stated Monday. “It provides more of a safe and sound manner for firefighters that are making use of that equipment — less maintenance on them. The older the apparatus, the more that you are gonna have to do to keep it and continue maintaining it at a high amount.”

The tanker inclusion additionally raises the chance of a lower Insurance provider business (ISO) rating the very next time the department is examined, Winters said. Fire divisions when you look at the U.S. are given an ISO score considering a variety elements, like the level of water able to be used in fighting a crisis. Insurance providers after that utilize the rating to ascertain premiums for residents within a department’s jurisdiction.