Your Fire Dept Could Lose It All

[ashfire]

What would you do if this happened where you live? Here in the county where I live we have a combination system of career and volunteer fire and rescue providers. The county fire service has control over the services provided but the volunteer corperations own most of the 30 some stations and over 100 pieces of apparatus like pumpers, ladder trucks, heavy rescue trucks,
some ambulances and a variety of other types of emergency units.
The county owns 12 stations 30 some fire and rescue apparatus and 70 ambulances.
One volunteer station got into financial problems when they used their two fire pumpers as collateral to buy a new heavy rescue truck for their area.
Well things happened. The officership of the department changed, money slowed from fund raising, someone may have skimmed money from the department's finances.
The bank notified the department they had until this week to make payment or lose everything.
The county volunteer association came in and said they would do what they could to provide the dept with a fire pumper from another volunteer dept if they could not come up with the money. The county said if they lose their apparatus the station would be closed down and boarded up. The town the fire station sat in would have to depend on nearby stations for protection.
Well some how another nearby department came through and gave the station money to meet their payment plus they held a boot drive at a nearby intersection to collect money from passing motorist.
Another department in our county wasn't has fortunate a few years ago and lost the station and the fire pumpers, ladder truck and new ambulance because their means of money fund raising was shut off by the state and they had not put money in the bank for savings to build up to make payments.
So what would you or you community do if your local fire company was in trouble over finances?

[mitsuki lover]

It would be definitely bad since we are in a forested rural area and Summers are
a dangerous time with threat of wild fires,etc. always there.Without our fire department a bad Summer could be even more disastrous than usual.Many people
live in the country,including the forest.
As far as what the community would do...That's a good question.The need for
good fire protection is one of the most urgent things we have.Hopefully they would
find a way of keeping it going as long as Summer lasted and then figured out a way
of sorting the finances out when the fire season was over.