CANNELBURG— A small volunteer fire department saw a need for a new fire house and now they have it built. The Cannelburg Volunteer Fire Department has now opened a new fire station on St. Mary’s Road.
“We started planning this more than five years ago,” said Cannelburg Volunteer Fire Department Assistant Chief Jordan Graber. “About half of our volunteers live on St. Mary’s Road. That means that anytime there is a fire in that area, the responders would have to drive to Cannelburg and get a truck. That didn’t make a lot of sense. For a while, one of our guys parked a fire engine in his garage. As we worked with it, we found that on every run the truck parked on St. Mary’s would beat the one from Cannelburg by 10 minutes.”
Graber says after the test, the department moved the truck back to Cannelburg. Then a fire wiped out a home in the area.
“The house wound up burning to the ground,” he said. “We felt like if we had had a truck closer that would not have happened. At that point we put out some feelers to the community about adding a fire house and they said they wanted it.”
The fire department then went into fundraising mode. They had several events and received enough donations to purchase a plot of land at CR 250 N. and St. Mary’s Road. The land purchase wiped out the money and put the department back into raising money.
“We finally got enough to build. We realized we wouldn’t have enough to build a nice, new full fire station, but we did manage to get enough to build a two-bay building to park two fire trucks in,” said Graber. “We got some good deals on the building, and then more people chipped in and we got enough money to put a newer truck in there.”
Graber said the department spent $140,000 on the building, almost all of it coming from people living in the area.
“The government is totally out of it,” said Graber. “There is not a single cent of tax money that went to this project.”
Graber has nothing but praise for the people in far eastern Daviess County for their support of the project.
“I am pretty thankful about the community we live in,” said Graber. “There is something real special about the people around there. They understand needs and wants. They knew they needed the fire station. In the long run it will pay for itself for them. This is going to save the people who live in that area 30% on their home owner’s insurance.”
Graber says that even when it felt like the project might fall apart the community came through.
“Somebody came in at the last minute and donated the metal to finish the inside of the building and all of the electrical work,” he said. “The Amish-Mennonite community out here really made a difference.”
The fire department isn’t done yet. With a new facility, they are now looking to fill it with upgraded equipment.
“We have a used pumper that we purchased and it will be delivered next week,” said Graber. “The plan is, down the road, in a year or two, we would like to add a new brush truck to respond to brush fires and medical calls. We will equip it with an AED and the equipment we use on medical runs.”
While there are no plans to immediately expand the new fire station, Graber says it was built with the idea of getting bigger in the future.
“We can add on to it if we ever need to,” he said. “We could put a meeting room on there if we