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Thursday, September 9, 2010 |
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VFDs to use grant from GVEC for training
Published August 13, 2008
MCQUEENEY — The Guadalupe County Firefighters Association has received a $25,000 grant it hopes will go up in smoke.
Nope, it’s not another example of a waste of public money — it could save lives of firefighters and of citizens they’re sometimes forced to go into burning buildings to save.
What the $24,787 grant will be used for is to repair the “burn house” at the Guadalupe County Fire Training Field located next to Canyon Regional Water Supply Corp., which in the early 1990s leased the site to the fire association for $1 so it could conduct training for local volunteer firefighters without having to send them on expensive trips to College Station or elsewhere.
The structure is used to teach firefighters how to work in burning, smoke-filled buildings with temperatures several hundred degrees or higher, and even though it is built of concrete block, McQueeney Fire Chief Tim Bogisch said, repeatedly lighting fires in the facility and extinguishing them has taken its toll, and the building needs about $38,000 in repairs and upgrades.
The grant, presented here in Seguin recently by Guadalupe Valley Electric Cooperative employee Dawn Southwell, is part of the Lower Colorado River Authority’s Community and Economic Development grant program, which pays for everything from public parks to recycling programs.
“When the facility was built in 1992, the ceiling was framed in steel and we had non-flammable tiles put up to protect the structure,” Bogisch said. “But over the last 16 years of use and abuse, they’ve fallen down.”
Now, fires used for training threaten to overheat and bend the steel roof trusses, and the ceiling needs to be repaired and heat sensors installed so instructors outside the building can tell if there’s a problem inside during training.
Over the years, the fire training facility has become more and more important regionally as volunteer fire departments and their unpaid help try to meet the requirements of rising standards for volunteer training.
Each September and October, the local association invites 150 students from Mineral Wells to Edinburg to participate in local training, and on an average year, counting local firefighters, 200 take the training in McQueeney.
The State Firemen and Fire Marshals Association has in recent years revamped volunteer training so it can take place over four weekends. Under an agreement with a similar facility in Beeville, volunteers in this area can now get all four phases of the training in a single year.
“It’s always been difficult to have volunteers take time off from their paying jobs to spend a week in College Station,” Bogisch said. “We have it worked out so if you can take eight weekends off a year, you can take the course.”
Bogisch, who serves as chairman on the board of the training field, said the county association had already earmarked another $10,000 for the work. The rest, he said, would be sought through local donations or sponsors, including H-E-B and GVEC, which he said have been instrumental over the years in building and maintaining the facility.
New Berlin Volunteer Fire Department Chief Kurt Strey, who serves as secretary/treasurer of the firefighters association, thanked LCRA and the other businesses and private citizens who support the county’s volunteers.
“The benefit of having a local training field is a tremendous asset contributing to the success and safety of our county firefighters and surrounding communities,” Strey said. “The assistance we are receiving to maintain and upgrade our facilities is of great help to providing a training ground for the firefighters and rescue personnel that we depend on to save life and property. We appreciate the assistance from LCRA and from our donors, as without them, we could not continue to offer such excellent training programs.”
Bogisch said work on the renovations would soon get under way.
“Hopefully, we can begin the work in two to three weeks,” Bogisch said. “We’ll need to use the burn house the second week in October, and we hope to have it done by then.”
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