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Though the station has a newly acquired ambulance,
A super firetruck, of sorts, Berea's truck can do the job |
The Berea Fire & Rescue Station No. 12, the newest of Stafford County's 15 stations, celebrated its debut with an open house for dozens of local residents last weekend, where it was announced that in just four months of service it is already the second busiest station in Stafford County. Aquia Harbor is the busiest.
Board of Supervisors Chairman George Schwartz, speaking at the ceremonies, said Station 12 has responded to more than 700 dispatches for service. That's five or six a day. "I know at first-hand the positive impact of the station," Sch-wartz said. He lives in the area covered by Berea.
Most prominent among the fire, emergency and non-emergency responses by the station's 12-man staff, Schwartz said, was its work in the recovery efforts following the night-time tornado strike in May in the nearby England Run community. The station dealt with immediate damage from the storm and also served in recovery efforts afterward, clearing debris and setting up shelters and service centers.
Berea is the first county-built-and-paid-for fire and rescue station in Stafford. It operates with a single piece of equipment, a large truck called a Quint, which requires a four-man crew on each of three shifts around the clock. That makes up Berea's 12-man staff, including the commanding officer, Lt. Matthew Warren.
The Quint can do multiple fire-fighting jobs, often done separately by a pumper or a tanker or a ladder truck. It has: a 105-foot aerial ladder with a built-in hose that can shoot 350 gallons a minute from the top; a pump; a 480-gallon water tank and 20 gallons of foam concentrate; 1,000 feet of hose; and 85 feet of ground ladders.
A Quint can do anything other individual vehicles can do except transport patients. It is the only one in Stafford and one of four in eastern Virginia.
Berea is supposed to have two other vehicles on duty in addition to the Quint: a pumper/tanker fire truck and an ambulance. There is no fire truck in Station 12 and none provided for in the 2008-09 county budget. Berea acquired its $140,000 ambulance six weeks ago, but there is no staff for it in the 07-08 or 08-09 budgets. Six EMS personnel are required to run it, two for each shift.
The Berea ambulance has been used when needed by EMS teams from other stations. It has spent half of its past six weeks in service on temporary duty elsewhere, including a week at Rock Hill's Station 8 while the ambulance there was out of service for maintenance.
The current training class of career firefighters will graduate in September, but none of its nine members is earmarked for Berea. There are three four-month classes a year. Five of Stafford's 11 fire and rescue stations have career medic units and one has a volunteer medic unit. The ambulances at the county's four rescue-only stations are all manned by volunteers.
Berea fills a key gap in southern Stafford, between the Falmouth and Hartwood fire stations. The resulting overlapping coverage is indicated in the daily logs, as open house visitors saw firsthand on Saturday.
Five minutes after the opening ceremony ended, the alarm sounded and the Quint was quickly gone. It was back in nine minutes, from a no-injury car accident on nearby Interstate 95. Falmouth's Station 1 had been first on the scene. An hour later there was another alarm, for a car that went off the road on I-95. The Quint was back in 10 minutes. Station 2 from Stafford had got there first.
"But you never know what the next alarm will bring," said Lt. Warren.
Hugh Muir: 540/735-1975
Email: hmuir@freelancestar.com
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The open house Saturday had tables set up by local groups, including the Falls Run Neighborhood Watch, which coordinates its reports with the Fire and Rescue Department as well as with the Sheriff's Office, and the Greater Falls Run Lions Club, which had its sight-and-hearing bus there offering testings. Also there, making its public debut, was the Berea Auxiliary, recruiting members. The new Berea Auxiliary is coordinated by Harriette Chandler, a resident of Falls Run, a community two-minutes response time away. It was organized on May 7 with five members and now has 24. Those interested in joining can call Chandler at 540/370-0773 or e-mail her at canarylover@cox.net. "We're here to help," Chandler said. "We're here to raise money for things the fire department needs." On a dry whiteboard in the station's training room is the "Company 12 Fantasy List," drawn up by wishful firefighters. Some things are of a technical nature but some are more domestic. One of the latter is "drapes and shades." Visitors noted there was not a single shade or curtain on the new building's many windows. "One of the first things we're going to pay for," Chandler said, "is to get dark tint put on the windows in the training room, where at certain times of day the sun just pours in. You can hardly see a thing on the lesson boards." --Hugh Muir |
