These brush fires aren't like the massive ones you see in other parts of the country. Trees here are rarely dry enough to catch fire, although crews say it's the unpredictability of the outdoors that makes them dangerous.

"A little fire that doesn't look like anything, you add a lot of wind to it, and it's like a blow torch. It just kind of goes," said Williams. "And if there's a lot of fuel, what we call it, it could just take right off."

And there's a lot of different tools that they use to fight these outdoor fires, from wearing lightweight jackets to using rakes and axes, and even sometimes carrying their water right on their backs.

"We're probably going to be away from the road, probably not going to have hydrants," said Williams, "so taking an engine, yeah, it has a lot of water, and we can use it to refill smaller equipment, and that's typically what would happen."

At the southeast corner of Alabama Highway 69 and County Road 1651, the Grand Opening and Ribbon Cutting for the long planned and now first ever joint fire station facility in Cullman County happened Saturday, May 21 2016, at 10 am.

The new station is called: Berlin & Fairview Volunteer Fire & Rescue Station #3.

Dozen of people from the nearby community as well as from around the county attended. Free hamburgers and hot dogs as well as side dishes and drinks were served to all guests.

The new Fire Station No. 1 will sit on the southeast corner of the old Safeway lot, 1122 11th Ave.

This project is part of the City Center project, which aims to consolidate city offices into one campus. Various departments are relocating, but because the fire station will be a standalone building, it gets its new digs first.

The building will house Greeley Fire Department's administrative space, 10 dormitory bedrooms, a fitness area, a four-truck bay and a community conference room.

Officials put an $8.6 million cap on the new station, and they’re meeting that goal, according to city documents.

The fire station might also include a hose-drying tower, if there’s room in the budget once the designs are finalized. These towers cut down on energy use — limiting the electricity needed to dry the hoses — and on wear and tear, city documents said.

"One thing people don't understand is that this is our house," says Lt. Nelson Rossy, a 21-year veteran of Dallas Fire-Rescue who now supervises its building projects. "We're the only city building that operates the way we do." Indeed, a fire station is unique among public buildings in that it is a place not just to work but to cook, eat, sleep (albeit lightly), work out, hang out, read, watch television, argue about the Cowboys and play the occasional game of pingpong.

It's also a place to clean. Firefighters spend a good portion of their time maintaining their stations, a Sisyphean task exacerbated by the fact that many Dallas facilities are aging and obsolete relics that have reached the end of their life cycles. Twenty of the city's 57 stations are more than half a century old, and that's not including Station 11, a city landmark built in 1909 but remodeled in 1985. More than half of the stations are over 40 years old.

City bond programs of 2003 and 2006 sought to ameliorate this problem with the construction of 11 new stations. These efforts have been beset by delays, such that the last of these facilities, Station 6 in South Dallas, is only now under construction. Architecturally, the results have been mixed, with Preston Center's Station 27, which opened last December, the unofficial standard-bearer of the program.