r/Firefighting • u/The_Road_is_Calling NH FF • Nov 25 '24

News Ohio fire department confronted about response to double fatal fire

https://chroniclet.com/news/411559/wakeman-fire-board-meeting-ends-in-shouting-match-over-fatal-fire/
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u/Sawing_zs Nov 25 '24

Need to know what equipment arrived on scene and when. Was it 3 guys in personal vehicles or an engine with full turned out firefighters?

Tragic story. Hope it ends with a volunteer department going full time professional and saving someone’s life down the line.

3

u/trinitywindu VolFF Nov 25 '24

Someone posted elsewhere here they had an engine confirmed arrived in 4.5 mins. Unknown staffing but at least an engine to move water. Tanker was there a minute later. So they had plenty of water to start.

1

u/BnaditCorps Nov 26 '24

The town has a census population of 1010 people they do not have the funding to support a full-time professional fire department in any capacity. This is unfortunately a tragedy that could happen in most of America because of how rural and separated these small communities are.

The next larger town is Norwalk, Ohio with a population of 17,000. They're 20 minutes away. 

Something that we need to understand as a fire service in America is that while the majority of incidents do happen in the larger municipalities and metropolitan areas the rule lesser populated portions of the country still have emergencies but do not have the funding to support full-time emergency response services. It's not a matter of these places not wanting to pay for those services it's just a matter of it's such a small tax base that it would be so economically impractical to provide those services that they can't. Thus the smaller towns end up with volunteer fire departments and the county sheriff providing law enforcement. We're talking about towns so small that everyone still has their own well and septic tank because they can't afford the cost of public sewer and water infrastructure.

Don't confuse what I'm saying with not needing to train. You should always be training for what could happen because when it does that is not the time to learn. 

I hope that this department learns from what happened and moving forward adopts a better training curriculum to train their people and improves.