Fire protection in Jasper County stacks up well
By SHARON KERR Staff Writer

Newsboy photo/ Charles Kerr MUTUAL AID requires hands-on practice; seven departments used five pumpers to see if they could keep up the ISO requirement of 250 gallons per minute for two hours - and they did it.

Startled walkers at Sandy Creek Park in Jasper must have thought there was a huge fire somewhere Saturday morning, Oct. 20. Tanker trucks from almost every volunteer fire department in Jasper County made continuous round trips to the pond fill their tanks.

"It's all about practice," said Bob Gary, fire chief for the East End VFD. "That, and maybe saving people money on their insurance."

Volunteers from Jasper, Lake Sam Rayburn, Angelina River, Roganville, Kirbvyille, Tri-Community and East End practiced setting up the collapsible tanks in front of Jasper High School. Then they loaded up to go practice drafting water from the pond at Sandy Creek.

At peak action, each tanker was making 14-minute turnarounds- that's drive time, sucking 3,000 gallons of water, and offloading it into a holding tank.

The reason for the drill, Gary said, is that the departments are getting ready for an ISO audit. The ISO, originally the Insurance Services Office, has created a national standardized rating system that determines what fire insurance rates will be in any given locale.

Departments are rated on a 10-point scale, where lower numbers translate to lower rates. The city of Jasper is currently rated five; most rural fire departments like the rest of the county are a nine, both good ratings for the size of the communities they support.

"We're shooting for a two," Gary said. "That would be a substantial benefit to homeowners and commercial businesses on their insurance rates."

The rating is based partly on how well departments are equipped, and partly on performance of the firefighters in timed tests.

When ISO comes to test, Gary said tankers have five minutes from the time they arrive on the scene to get a flow rate of 250 gallons per minute, and that rate has to be maintained for two hours.

"That's hard to do," Gary said, but at the training session last Saturday, firefighters beat that requirement by almost double. The key, according to Gary, is mutual aid and practice.

Some tankers hold 3,000 gallons and some 1,800. For practice, they linked three holding tanks for a total of 4,800 gallons. They used five tankers to make continuous round trips to the pond. The rate water could be pumped from the holding tanks to the lawn was measured by a flow meter.

"All our departments work well together,"

Gary said. At the training class, he stressed the need to know who is closest, plan ahead and communicate.

"Let mutual aid know who their contact is going to be on the scene and what you want them to do before they get there," Gary said.

The biggest problem volunteer fire departments face all over the county is having enough people.

"It takes a minimum of two people per tanker, and you never know who will be available when you get called out. That's why we need days like this where everybody gets a turn to have hands-on training," Gary said.

Every VFD in Jasper now has a pumper truck. Most were purchased with the assistance of grants from the Texas Forest Service. These units are vital to rural areas where water supplies may be unreliable or nonexistent.

"We can pump water out of anything, a swimming pool, a pond, a ditch," Gary said. "Anywhere we can get close enough with

the truck."

That's 29 feet in perfect feet in up and down terrain and allowing two feet into the water source.

"You have to figure we could be called to something like a plane crash or a forest fire where there is no water, or even a structure fire in some of community that only has a three-inch water line. The only way to get enough water to fight a fire is with tankers," Gary said.

When Lum Hawthorne's historic log home burned, the responding units pumped 55,000 gallons trying to control the blaze.

"It was so hot it blistered paint and men had to stand behind trees because of the radiant heat," Gary said. "Without tankers like this, we could not have done anything. As it is, we had to lay 800 feet of line by hand."

The next day, Sunday, Gary said they had another practice, this time for real. Six trucks including pumpers responded to a 25-acre fire that burned from U.S. Highway 96 almost to Hi Truett Road and threatened two structures.

"These pumpers are life savers," Gary said, but even with the TFS grants, "All the departments are pumper-poor now. We have these units and we have to maintain them and practice with them, and that all costs money."

The rural fire departments only receive $6,000 per year from the fire district, Emergency District #4.

"One set of bunker gear is $1,300 and an air pack is $5,000," Gary said. "That's lifesaving equipment for our volunteers and we have to have it."

He said he hopes the next time an increase for the Emergency District is on the ballot, that voters will appreciate the time and efforts of their volunteer fire departments and vote more funds.

"We're doing all we can to improve our training in the hopes to bring their insurance rates down, and I sure hope people will notice and appreciate it for the sake of all these departments," Gary said.