Residents in northwest Minot won’t have to wait much longer for improved fire protection, as FA reported earlier.

Although heavy equipment has already been working at the site along Fourth Avenue NW for weeks, Fire Chief Kelli Kronschnabel and others helped “officially” break ground for Fire Station 5 on June 6.

“Every time I drive by here, I think back to when the discussion of Fire Station 5 in this location first began, and I appreciate how far we’ve come with this project,” Kronschnabel said at a groundbreaking ceremony. “For the past couple years, we’ve a sign here that says ‘Future home of Fire Station 5.’ Well, the future is here. We’re happy to become part of this neighborhood. I’m looking forward to seeing you all here again next summer when we celebrate Fire Station 5’s grand opening.”

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City Manager Harold Stewart and Mayor Shaun Sipma joined Kronschnabel in celebrating the construction of Fire Station 5.

“There’s a lot of satisfaction and pride taken by this community with regards to our fire department, and we want to continue to hold that standard,” Stewart said. “Improvements like this will help us to continue to hold that standard and improve that standard for the foreseeable future.”

Sipma highlighted the ongoing commercial and residential growth happening in northwest Minot, as well as a new high school on north hill, as reasons why Fire Station 5 is so important.

“The changing landscape of northwest Minot requires that the City of Minot’s commitment to fire safety must evolve, too. That’s why we’re here today,” Sipma said. “It’s critical that the expanding business community in northwest Minot is afforded the same peace of mind regarding proper fire and emergency response as other parts of our community. That’s why we’re here today.”

Construction on the approximately $3.8 million project is under way and expected to be complete in the spring of 2023, with the station being operational later that summer.

The City of Wheeling’s Warwood fire station is home to a brand-new engine truck.

New Engine 9 – housed at Station 9 on Richland Avenue is a 2022 Sutphen 1,750-gallons-per-minute Shield Pumper. The truck rolled off the assembly line at the Sutphen Corporation facility in Dublin, Ohio in late April, but wasn’t officially put in service by the Wheeling Fire Department until Sunday, June 5.

New Engine 9 is the first brand new fire truck for the Warwood station since 1962. Many used fire trucks have served the area since then, with the most recent being a 1987 model.

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“We sure did get good use out of our former 35-year-old truck for Warwood,” said Wheeling Fire Chief Jim Blazier. “This new, up-to-date addition to our fleet ensures that the Wheeling Fire Department is well equipped to fight fires and respond to various emergencies for another generation.”

In recent years, the fire department has been able to update its fleet, most recently with two new ambulances, and a new ladder truck in 2021. The new additions also allow WFD to keep older models in service for spares.

Wheeling City Council passed an ordinance to purchase Engine 9 in December 2020, using money from the city’s project fund.

The Fairview Volunteer Fire Department is looking to upgrade outdated SCBA equipment, reports cullmantimes.com.

The department’s current SCBA equipment is 20 years old and was last certified in 2019, according to the report.

Department officials have applied for a grant that would allow for the purchase of 15 new units at about $9,000 each. They’ll find out if they’ll get it in September.

Smeal—Charlotte (NC) Fire Department 100-foot mid-mount platform quint. Spartan Gladiator EMFD flat roof cab and chassis; Cummins X15 600-hp engine; Waterous CSUD-TC20B 2,000-gpm pump; 300-gallon polypropylene water tank; Harrison 10-kW generator. Dealer: Steve Dill, Atlantic Coast Fire Trucks, Denver, NC.

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Carl J. Haddon

The spirit of the American emergency services volunteer seems to be alive and well, even though our numbers are dwindling quickly. Recruitment and retention are still the biggest challenges, with very few people having more (than less) time to volunteer. Volunteering requires a whole lot more of our time than it used to, and our collective pool of volunteers doesn’t seem to be getting any younger.

Ever-growing demands of time surrounding training, maintaining certifications, continuing education credits, and often having to travel for hours simply to find a certification testing site, simply works against volunteer agencies being able to grow and retain their numbers of volunteers.

In my very rural part of the country, we not only have our volunteer fire departments (of those, a number of which do not do any type of rescue or EMS work), we have two volunteer ambulance services, and a volunteer search and rescue service that handles all rescue and extrication calls. Imagine, if you will, the struggle for grant dollars to keep each of these three wonderful services afloat. If search and rescue is working a grant for a new rescue truck at the same time that one or more of the volunteer fire departments are working toward a new or newer apparatus, they’re often competing against each other for the same grant money.

A few weeks ago, our local county Emergency Services Director asked me if I’d help them toward obtaining an EMS grant, that was specifically funding new extrication tools. The grant is being administered by our state Health and Human Services. The requirements for the grant seemed straightforward enough to me, but as it would play out, nothing could have been further from the truth.

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The Emergency Services Director for our county asked me for my teaching credentials/IFSAC or Pro Board certs and my Curriculum Vitae (as I volunteer to teach fire/rescue/EMS classes for our organizations). After providing all that was asked of me, the gentlemen from State Health and Human Services said that I needed to provide them with a specific certificate that shows “I’m qualified to teach an operations level extrication program.”

To say I was flabbergasted with their reply would be putting it mildly. My Level 2 IFSAC/Pro Board instructor certs, 20-plus years as an instructor, and my 35-plus years in the career and volunteer fire and EMS service didn’t suffice? I called all over the country to other agencies and a host of fellow instructors asking if anyone had ever heard of such a thing. Nobody had. That was when I had to go back, re-read the email, and look to see who and what agency was administering this grant. Did I mention that it