Six fire departments under Grady County Emergency Management and the Amber Fire Department responded to the fire at the fracking site on Highway 39 run by Continental Resources.

Grady County officials said at least 40 sets of bunker gear and 3,000 feet of hose were soaked in crude oil and left unusable after battling the fire.

"It's a hard hit," said Mike Norman, fire chief for the Amber Fire Department. "Everything that was on that site that was going up in the air or that was below our feet, it was on us."

Noman said the Amber Fire Department sustained at least $20,000 worth of equipment damage.

"It hurts the pocketbook," Norman said. "We don't have the money, nor the funding, to come back and replenish this."

Dale Thompson, director of Grady County Emergency Management, said the organization is working with Continental Resources to get help for the fire departments.

Thompson said the fire departments will have to revert back to their old gear until they can get replacements for the gear that was damaged. Fire departments told KOCO that the damaged equipment will not impact fire response times.

For more information, view www.koco.com

A silver Nissan Sentra & HFD Fire Truck collide on Wall Triana @ 12:05pm. HPD says no major injuries. @whnt pic.twitter.com/NkQItgnTfD

— Courtney Crown (@CourtCrownWHNT) January 17, 2016

Huntsville police said a silver Nissan Sentra hit a Huntsville Fire Department truck near James Madison Drive and Wall Triana HWY around 12:05 p.m. Sunday afternoon.

Authorities say that there were minor injuries to one passenger in the car.

Huntsville Police are investigating the cause of the wreck.

For more information, view whnt.com

Two people were injured in a collision with a fire truck in Orange Park, late Friday night, according to the Florida Highway Patrol.

The fire truck was traveling south on Blanding Blvd. when it put on its siren and attempted to turn onto Kingsley Ave., according to FHP investigators.

The driver of a 2002 Saturn failed to stop at the intersection and hit the front side of the fire truck, leaving the driver in critical condition and the passenger with minor injuries.

For more information, view www.news4jax.com

Voters at an upcoming special town meeting will be asked to approve funding for major repairs on the Fire Department's ladder truck, which was found during routine maintenance to have severe corrosion.

The cost of the project is estimated at up to $350,000, Deputy Fire Chief Chris O'Brien told the Selectboard recently. The truck has been sidelined since October, requiring the town to rely on mutual aid from Pittsfield or Great Barrington in case a ladder is needed.

Although the ailing truck is 20 years old, the repair is expected to give it up to 10 more years of life, O'Brien said.

The cost to replace the "severely damaged" aluminum frame will not increase taxes nor will it disrupt longer-range capital improvement needs, Town Manager Christopher Ketchen said.

He noted that voters at last May's annual town meeting already had appropriated $650,000 for the purchase of a new engine for one of its pumper trucks.

Based on meetings with department staff, consultants and the town's Capital Improvement Committee, the town manager proposed diverting $350,000 from the funds set aside for the pumper truck project in order to repair the ladder truck. In addition, the plan calls for advancing $175,000 from "free cash" into the pumper truck fund.

O'Brien said the pumper can likely last at least another year, so town meeting voters could be asked in 2017 to approve $125,000 more to bring the pumper repair fund back up to $650,000.

If voters approve the fund transfers, the project would "bring the ladder truck back into service as soon as possible, it does not raise taxes and it does not in any way disrupt the overall capital improvement plan," Ketchen said.

O'Brien said that during last October's routine maintenance, a "substantial deficiency" was found with the frame caused by corrosion. In the view of several contractors who viewed the truck, he said, "it isn't driveable and you shouldn't have been using it to begin with."

"This threw everybody for a loop," O'Brien said. "Nobody was as shocked as we were."

A fire apparatus contractor, Colden Enterprises, in Tonawanda, N.Y., supplied the $350,000 estimate for the three-month repair job after examining the equipment.

The project is complicated by space restrictions at the central fire station, O'Brien noted, thus requiring a "labor-intensive" repair. The only other option, the deputy chief learned, would be to scrap the truck, which would yield only about $30,000 for the town. A new ladder truck likely would cost close to $1 million, he said.

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