INSIDE West Grove Fire Company Station No. 22 | Station Cribs

welcome back to another episode of station cribs we are in southern chester county the capital of mushroom country here we are at station 22 west grove there are three stations we're going to review today and this is our first [Music] so we are here with bill wall he is a 40-year member of the station probably the best historian we have and he's going to talk us through a lot of the stuff that goes on today so well it's the best you have because i'm all the tears so welcome to the west grove fire company we're standing out front on prospect street in west grove because this is where it all started fire companies formed in 1904 and this original building actually were the stables that held horse-drawn apparatus and you can see on the curves over the windows this is where those original doors were a little later on in your program today we're going to look at the first motorized piece of apparatus that we purchased in 1928 hail and it was backed right into this building right behind where you're standing alongside the last horse-drawn apparatus so there's a lot of history there let's go take a look inside sounds good so what i understand is this used to be the old engines but in the engine bay but now it's converted multiple times over the years into office space and usable space well we would say not engine bays but stables but let's go take a look so now this becomes our general purpose meeting room where we do our monthly meetings business meetings and we also do fire and ems training in here one of the special things about this room because this is used to be where the horses were actually located is the original parade banner of the fire company this thing was in horrible shape and back around our early anniversaries we decided to completely restore it and we turned to the experts at winniter museum in wilmington delaware and they helped us find a restoration expert to put this back together so there's a lot of real history in this room but this building now serves as the office building for the fire company meeting and training downstairs administrative offices for fire and ems are upstairs and you do public training too you offer classes of cpr we do we have we we do cpr training in the community but we spend a lot of time focused on our 50 members and our staff because the training requirements are so significant we never stop training so this room serves that purpose too our history is the community's history we're firmly embedded in it and we've made a real priority at west grove to preserve that history and make it available that's what this is all about absolutely now that we're moving out of the office space and the community space we're going to go into the engine bay and this is a building towards the back but when was that added well as you'll see in the building we keep adding on as we've grown through the years and so you'll see the a few original bays then we added on and ultimately added on the ladder bay as the apparatus grew in height and length and we outgrew the relatively small apparatus floor that we have here we've talked a lot about the future of this site in west grove and have a committee evaluating how do we adapt this fire station now to the modern reality of the 2020s you know the requirements to keep gear and apparatus separate to have a clean room for staff to have bunks for for crews to stay here this facility's just not set up for that and so now we're trying to evaluate how do we make best use of the footprint we have here in west grove given those new realities we have a complement of suppression and ems equipment that we have at all of our stations here in west grove which has always been the main house it's where i started 40 years ago we maintain an ambulance and an engine we sized the engine to be a primary suppression piece it's 2 000 gallon per minute pumps got a thousand gallons of water but it fits nicely in this building but we don't have the benefit of drive-through here certainly don't have a ramp to pull out on we're downtown and that's the way it's always been and in the apparatus floor we have all of the gear for our volunteers and our career staff makes it very easy to get to yeah it's everything's close in but the new requirements mean we now need to separate all of this out but there's space for the engineers and space for storage of ems equipment and to refresh the apparatus but as we've grown and the apparatus has gotten a lot larger what was over here had to be added on so as we enter the what we call the ladder bay this extension was added on um 30 40 years ago now we have the length to fit apparatus that are 40 feet long and we have here in this side of the of the station our brand new ladder truck just went in service a year and a half ago and uh our tank truck which was just went in service why would you need such a large ladder truck in such a small kind of community well it's interesting this community while rural has a mix of commercial and residential properties and penn township has made it a priority to add a lot of 55-plus communities and many of those residents are in four and five-story apartment buildings so we need the height of a ladder truck for rescue but many of the rural driveways we go to for residential fires we need the reach of 105 foot ladder to get from the driveway to the roof line and actually it was the reach requirement and the ladder requirement that drove the size of this truck not actually overall height of building but as a volunteer you know coming to volunteer at this place you have the opportunity to learn how to drive these kind of things and you train them and get them up to speed and stuff like that so if i was a new guy maybe i was a young young guy or even an older guy coming here how do i go about getting trained to drive a ladder truck well it's interesting we're now what you call a combination department so we have a mix of paid staff who supplement the 50 to 60 active volunteers we have we could not run this department without volunteers that's our primary mission so we're always focused on finding new volunteers whether they start as junior members at 16 or whether they join the department in their middle ages and we have the requirements for people that can lift hose and support the fire ground operation but we also need people to do building maintenance to do fundraising to do public relations through community education and the effort to constantly recruit is never ending right last thing i see is a tanker i assume that you have those because you don't have hydrants all over the place or and are you part of a tanker task force so we've always had to bring water to fires that's the reality in a rural community certainly our community in the greater west grove area has grown up and some of the new housing developments do have fire hydrants we all had to learn how to use them they're great when we have them but there's still plenty of places we go in the 67 mile square miles of territory we cover where the closest water is a 10 minute ride away so having 3 500 gallons show up immediately at the scene means we can get an awful lot done before more help arrives and we work with a lot of mutual aid companies here in the southern end from oxford all the way to longwood everybody has tankers and when the fire is really big and we need a lot of water those tanker task forces make the job possible and that's what makes the fire service so great we're all in it together and it's a shared responsibility and that means if we're light on people or they're light on people we're always backing each other up so the tankers the newest piece of apparatus just join the fleet replaced uh 25 year old piece and your audience i think will find interesting one of the things we're very proud of at westgrove is our leadership has built a 25-year apparatus replacement plan so we can tell the community and municipal officials here are the apparatus that are going to be replaced typically we expect 20 to 25 years out of every truck and so this one replaced a 25 year old tanker that we just sold off so we're working to manage the community's money it's their money it's their investment in us and to do it and that's something we're very proud of at west coast you see a beautiful fleet our volunteers are well equipped we put a lot of effort in making sure we're financially sound very cool how about we go take a look at those other states okay great all right we are here now at the second station of west grove and uh if you've liked what you've seen do me a favor click subscribe it helps us out uh keeps us moving and keeps us going so let's go ahead and start talking about this one and this is a new property a fairly new property for you as i was driving over here i noticed a lot of new houses and communities you still got some farms and stuff but there's a lot of population pop yeah there was there was a big growth of population in southern chester county in the late 1980s and 1990s and recognizing that we were some distance from westgrove with big territory we made a strategic decision to not centralize to add substations to better cover our geographical areas so the opportunity to be here on route 896 which is a heavily traveled road and gives us access and then this property became available we already had an outpost of volunteers that had moved into the area some from delaware county who wanted to run with west grove but they were a 15-minute run to the main station to make that first truck right so we created this outpost out here in 1993 and we loved this property because it gave us a lot of room to expand and so as we grew out here and added volunteers we added apparatus and ultimately added on to the structure and so we modernized the apparatus floor and then we added a structure which gave us the necessaries of really nice bathrooms handicap access but we have a meeting and training room okay and then upstairs we have bunk rooms in a crew room so we can have people here 24 7. right and the property which gives us multiple acres to expand on not only for the future but it gives us room to do cutting up cars to do exterior training we have a firefighter training trailer located here so there are a lot of options and this happened and this is important mike because of the support we get from the community the township officials in the multiple townships we serve have been very supportive to us through the years we couldn't do this without them and new london township where this station is located was particularly interested in us being here they've been quite supportive as i'm going down the walk here we see you've got a couple different trucks you've got looks like a brush truck an engine two pumpers can you tell me exactly what you have sure so keeping the fact this was a rural station for a long time brush fires were a regular occurrence um so the brush pieces here this give us the capability to take water out into the rural environment and while the community's grown up and brush fires don't happen as much anymore it's still a necessary piece of apparatus then a primary suppression piece in engine two a very modern fire apparatus something we're very proud of but because we're on route 896 and we service the u.s route one highway a rescue truck which also is a suppression piece but carries a specialized rescue for vehicle rescue when i started in the fire service here our rescue tools came all the way from kenneth square you might remember with southern chester county rescue station 71 so if you had an auto accident with entrapment it was a 20 minute run for the jaws of life to show up so now all of our equipment is has hydraulic rescue but the rescue truck is a giant tool box but there's a water tank on it and it's a fully outfitted suppression piece we try to keep the apparatus comparable you know when you buy them separated by years and years they're not exactly the same they all carry a thousand gallons of water they all have the capability to lay 1500 feet of supply line they all have hydraulic rescue equipment on them now although that equipment is starting to move to battery powered but that helps our drivers it helps our firefighters for things to be in common locations and common equipment and out here in new london because we have 24-hour crew station we keep two of the three ambulances we're running 2500 ems calls a year bls out of our station and 87 square miles of coverage so we're pretty busy and it takes a three ambulance fleet to get that job done but we're pretty busy fire department too we run 650 fire calls a year now those are not all active fires but between auto accidents and automatic alarms and everything that goes along with it we stay pretty busy right speaking of auto accidents i notice over here you know we got a car that looks like it's been in an accident already what's this about well one of the beauties of being located here in new london is we've got the space to practice vehicle rescue so we don't have to go to a training facility to do that and in fact we dedicate thousands of hours a year to training and so we now bring cars out here you can see some more in the background and we can bring out our rescue tools on a monday night which is our training night and have our volunteers cut them apart and get practice right here and we've racked up thousands and thousands of hours a year keeping our firefighters and emts trained on the changes so if you look at the typical car today you know we're we're seeing teslas everywhere those are big batteries the whole process of vehicle rescue changes with every new model year and we practice the latest techniques here so being down here in southern chester county you know training you've been mentioning i see this trailer here looks like a converted you know tractor trailer what is this thing all about so this is a fire training simulator and what this trailer allows us to do is evolutions from in the roof to simulated basement fires there are propane tanks on board we can make it pretty hot in there and we can take our crews at our own station or cruise from visiting local companies in and give them real fire like uh conditions and we decided as a group of southern chester county companies years ago to come together to make this purchase the combination of the local companies working together and grants the southern fire chiefs association got the trailer we now are the hosting company for the trailer it sits here because we have the space and southern chester county fire companies will schedule to come in here and train so before that you had to go into westchester or now you can go into coatesville those are really only two training places here in chester now that the county's made a substantial investment in a major center we're not that far from a really modern training facility but a lot of us who have been around the fire service for many years got our training at the delaware state fire school down in dover wow so the southern chiefs always wanted a way to train locally and to do it frequently and this is the result of that and as i mentioned earlier the support all of us have from residents and businesses who donate money every year and from municipal officials who support us make this kind of modern training possible very cool well as i'm standing here i see this huge tower behind your building you know one of the things that i keep getting from you is you know we're always trying to keep ahead of the ball game as far as finance and buildings and that kind of stuff is that part of the project where was that here when you got here or what we are we take a lot of pride at west grove in fiscal management we're running an operation now that's north of a million dollars a year in total expense and an apparatus fleet you know these these fire trucks cost 700 to a million dollars each to buy so we're always looking for sources of revenue when we bought the new london station we never envisioned a cell tower on site but we recognized the growing requirement for cellular communication and when t-mobile approached us and said we think your fire department might be a good location for 150 foot tower we immediately saw the opportunity the rent that we get from that tower every month helps pay our utilities and maintenance on all three stations and that tower will be here for 30 to 50 years and i got good self service uh and we get great cell service here and our antennas are also at the top of the tower so there's a good benefit to that and it serves as the central tower location for the new london township area anyway so it's been a win-win result for us all right well how about we load back up and go see the other stations so this is our third and final station for west grove this is their station that was built in 2012 but operational 2014 correct if you've looked at all these stations and you're thinking about volunteering please uh check out their website at wgfc.org and uh let them know you know they're always looking for volunteers so what's unique about this station well first of all welcome to london britain township we're now all the way down in the southern end of southern chester county the state line to delaware and maryland is just a few miles from here we're between west grove and newark delaware remember i said earlier in our strategic vision to put fire services where people were building first in new london to the west side of our district and we always had a view we need to go to the south end of our district we're about 15 minutes from new london about 15 minutes from west grove about 15 minutes from newark so this was a an area that needed to be served and here's where the london britain township really helped us out they operated a park here they said we've got some room in the park if we gave you a little over an acre of ground could you build a fire station here right on 896 so we have great access all around our district and so that project got started and uh here we are yeah so this building's the newest building it you know obviously doesn't have a whole lot of trucks here but it also has increased your volunteerism already correct we're actually fortunate as we film today's program we have a whole number of junior members who have joined and have gotten active here and a few firefighters who've come joined us so suddenly we're seeing an increase in volunteerism here which is perfect it's very much a model like it was in new london if you build it they will come people see the fire station here they want to join they want to be a part of the organization so we're pretty excited about it right so all three stations that we visited today they're all connected they're all one station so you know you could learn how to drive that tanker or that tower and stuff like that even though this might be your closest station to home you're part of the overall station we operate as one department we're all part of station 22 and west grove we cooperate together on calls we operated as we operate as a seamless unit even though our physical locations and our gear might be in in three different places literally a month after we opened this station there was a house fire not a mile away from here that would have been a call that would have taken 12 minutes for an apparatus to arrive from new london to west grove not because they're slow just the physical distance we were there in moments and saved that house so the investment we've made here to put a fire station in this area has paid itself off over and over again and that's the progressive nature of westgrove we're always looking in this organization to be out front in safety in training in apparatus in our financial management and how we serve our community so this floor is very nice there's a unique thing about the floor yeah one of the cool things about this building and it was a decision we made when we did the construction is to actually heat the floor so in the concrete are a series of tubes that flow antifreeze and that is heated and as you'll see in the video the furnace is is just about that big it's pretty tiny but once this concrete is heated up to 65 degrees even on the coldest winter day this building is toasty warm and it's a very efficient way for us to heat and it was a much simpler way to try to heat a massive space like this than traditional methods and we tried to bring that creative thinking into this building another thing that we did was you know we want to set a right example in construction so we created a firehouse with fire sprinklers pretty straightforward right having a sprinkler system but out here in the country where there's no municipal water service that's a problem right so outside we buried 30 thousand gallons of water in the ground and that thirty thousand gallons of water serves two purposes fifteen thousand gallons is dedicated to fire protection in this building and that leaves us fifteen thousand gallons of water that we can put into fire engines and tankers if we have a massive fire in this area so again trying to be progressive at west grove and doing things in a way that you know we can solve multiple problems with one investment so you know it's a smaller station but you have two trucks here you looks like you have a pickup truck sort of we call it we call it the utility okay and that's what it's there for right um you know look we're an outpost here the goal was to get a fire truck a suppression piece out in this area so the third engine engine three is the oldest pierce apparatus in our fleet it's a 1998 truck doesn't sound very old but according to our apparatus plan at about 25 years it's time to replace it so as much as we've had great service out of this vehicle next year it'll be replaced by a brand new seagrave which was just ordered last month so we have a suppression piece down here with a thousand gallons of water with hydraulic tools with all the hose that we've talked about earlier in this program and if the truck is not available to go we've got the utility here that can also run calls so as we're finishing up through this the smaller of the three stations i noticed something in the corner here you have a red fire truck we do yellow ones but this one is significantly older so i take us all the way back mike to where we started our tour in west grove and our early beginnings were horse-drawn apparatus in the early 1900s in 1928 the decision was made to purchase the first brand new piece of fire apparatus for westgrove and the truck that was purchased was a 1928 hail now most viewers of your program know hail for fire pumps but in the 1920s and 1930s in conshohocken pennsylvania they manufactured actual fire trucks so this is antique 22 and it is a recently restored five six years ago 1928 hail that function this one actually worked we could we can pump water with this truck if we want to but right now it's a great public relations vehicle you know the great story about this truck is it was in service in west grove from the late 1920s until the late 1940s we sold it to a private family in 1952 and we lost track of it eight years ago the phone rang at the fire station in west grove a nice little old lady named elsie thorpe asked for the fire chief and said her husband who had been a collector of antique vehicles had passed away they used to live in southern chester county she thinks the fire truck is ours and 10 days later we brought antique 22 home we drove all the way up to the new york pennsylvania border and brought her back and she was in terrible condition and we made the decision uh to do a frame off meaning completely disassemble the truck restoration it's a three-year project with a company that specializes in restorations and it was a six-figure restoration but our logic was this is the community's history and now look at her right so what i noticed is actually the name that was on it well mrs thorpe elsie was so kind to reach out to us she didn't have to do that and the day we brought the truck back from upstate pennsylvania we decided to nickname the truck elsie she got to see it before she passed away and and it has stuck as a name when we go out and take this out to parades people yell out there's elsie we're very proud of her and it goes back to how we started our discussion uh this evening we're very committed to the history of this organization fire companies are part of the lifeblood of their communities and we hope at some point to create an opportunity to put this back in west grove so it can be seen on prospect street in that original building but for now she proudly sits here in london britain right i mean just look at the difference between you know the old fire trucks and you know how used to driving open cabs and stuff like that you know i look at it and go people are crazy and then you look at the new stuff today there's a huge difference this this truck is fun to drive but i will tell you on a cold day there's no heat and uh a windshield i don't know how they used to do it uh given everything we know about firefighting we're so proud to have her and to have the avon grove history recorded we're part of the fabric of america and something that those of us in the fire service are very proud of and we're proud of that here in west grove too so we're just finishing up here at west grove we want to put a big shout out to our host giving us the information letting us see all three stations one mission one vision all community based fantastic things going on check out their website volunteer and thank you for watching please click below subscribe and we'll see you on the next video

Channel: Heroes Next Door

Views: 151,649

Rating: 4.9344029 out of 5

Keywords: inside, west grove, fire company, station no. 22, station cribs, tour, fire station, firefighter, fire truck, what's inside, walk through, southern chester county, pennsylvania, chester county, kennet square, avondale, history, heroes next door, heroes next door stories

Id: fI4PEFqHMtY

Length: 23min 27sec (1407 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 11 2020