On Monday, the Sandy Township Supervisors officially approved making their property, located at 3059 Oklahoma Salem Road, available for a future fire station for the new city of DuBois, if needed in consolidation, TheCourierExpress.com reported.

A city official said the property on Oklahoma Salem Road looks favorable to build a new fire station on but that it’s just preliminary at this time, the report said.

Here’s the Fire Study that was completed in July 2021 (PDF) regarding Sandy-Township and DuBois consolidation.

What started out as a $25,000 job to install equipment mounts, shelves and drawers in Butler (IN) Fire Department’s new fire truck, jumped to a $60,000 estimate, KPCNews.com reported.

After some consideration and discussion, the Butler Board of Works Monday agreed to a higher than expected quote, the report said.

Fire Manufacturing Innovations LLC of Springfield (OH) submitted a $60,000 quote to install the storage devices in the rescue-engine, which arrived earlier this month, according to the report.

The price has jumped considerably in a short period of time, a fire official said. The process for writing specifications for the apparatus — which will carry equipment from a rescue unit on a engine that pumps water — began in 2019.

The price started at $25,000, the fire official said. At the first of the year the official received an estimate between $30,000-$40,000 based on inflation. The last estimate came in at $60,000.

In making his motion to approve the bid, a city official said he would like to see an exact quote from the company saying this is how much it’s going to be, not just saying this is an estimate, the report said.

The Palmyra Fire Department added a brand new $750,000 engine to the fleet, wgem.com reported. A fire official said it is the department’s first new pumper truck since 1994.

It’s an addition to their current fleet, as they plan to open another station in Taylor (MO) and need an apparatus there, the report said.

The new truck features a 1,500-gallon-a-minute pump, a 1,000-gallon tank and a 23-foot light tower for lighting up the area at night in wrecks, the fire official said.

The new Taylor fire station is still in the design phase of the project, the report said.

The New Haven (CT) Board of Alders unanimously signed off on a plan recently to spend $4.5 million in federal pandemic-relief aid on new police cars, fire trucks, and fire hydrant fixes, NewHavenIndependent.org reported.

Alders unanimously approved the city’s plan to use American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding to acquire eight police SUVs for a total of $400,000, as well as two fire engines and one fire truck for a total of $3.7 million, the report said.

The now-approved spending plan also budgets $400,000 for fixing as many of New Haven’s approximately 100 defunct fire hydrants as possible, according to the report.

City leaders have argued that using one-time federal pandemic relief for public safety vehicle upgrades, rather than using bonds to fund those purchases, will save money in the long term, the report said.

By Ed Ballam

Our December issue has traditionally been dedicated to predicting the future. I can tell you if I could do it with accuracy, reliability, and predictability, I’d be a wealthy man.

And, as much as I love my job, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here trying to write this editorial. Predicting the future is hard, and I haven’t found a reliable crystal ball or a tarot card reader worth the money.

The truth is, most of us can’t tell what is going on in the next minute, forget about the next year. There are too many variables that influence each and every action, each and every second of the day. When you think about it, everything from the moment we wake up in the morning until we put our heads back down on the same pillow at night is a series of random events that are strung together to make up our days. We can have a schedule and a routine, but there will be constant variations.

We can also make a plan, follow it, and have results just the way we anticipated. Good on us for that ability. However, I guarantee there are dozens of major or minor interferences that needed to be resolved or dealt with before we achieved the final goal. Weather, a telephone call, personal issues, co-workers’ issues, family issues, mechanical failures, simple indigestion, and 10,000 other things that we never even recognize make up the fabric of our daily lives.

Think about what it’s like running a multimillion-dollar company with hundreds of employees and dozens and dozens of vendors. The variables that influence the future of those kinds of businesses exponentially increase over time. That is why only the best and most nimble survive.

We all know how unpredictable things can be in the fire and EMS world. You can go from napping in a recliner to fighting for your life and the lives of others in the blink of an eye. The only thing predictable for those in the emergency services is unpredictability. A good day means everyone makes it home with no injury and no serious equipment failures. Anything beyond that is a gift.

Predicting the future is really an art. Some people are good at it; most are not. It’s certain no one can do it with absolute clarity. I believe the best we humans can do is make educated guesses based on information, history, knowledge, and experience. That’s what weather forecasters do every day, and that’s for only a few hours or days at a time. Wall Street brokers do the same thing. And in our personal lives, we try to predict what’s going to happen using information and our intuition or gut feelings, but none of us knows what’s going to happen for certain.

No matter how we arrive at our predictions, they really are just educated guesses. From that, we can paint a picture of what the future might look like. That painting will be an impressionistic image, kind of fuzzed out. Photographic images of the future, as we know, are not possible—at least I can’t do it.

So, as this editorial is about what 2023 is supposed to look like, let me squint my eyes, gaze into the future, and pull some predictions out of someplace deep within. I know what some of you are thinking, and that’s probably exactly where they’re going to come from. Here goes nothing.

I predict ridiculously long lead times for equipment and apparatus. Everybody in the fire service industry says the same thing—supply chains issues, labor issues, and inflation are all causing price hikes and delivery delays from hose to tractor-drawn aerials and everything in between. As time goes on, there seems to be a snowball effect at play too with the issues getting bigger and pulling in more and more facets of the industr