Avon Grove Sun Honors Fire Company's Community Service

The area's local newspaper, the Avon Grove Sun, in it's current issue, has shed a positive light on the service the West Grove Fire Company provides to its local community in an editorial published this week.

You can view the editorial on the paper's website listed below.

We are grateful to the Avon Grove Sun for this editorial, and provide it here as a courtesy to the readers of the WGFC website:

Firefighters are brave and dedicated and deserve support

In October during Fire Prevention Month, we honor the brave men and women who endure heat, injury and sometimes death to save our lives.

Protecting the public when the flames strike is an old tradition started in 1736 by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia. For the city it was a profound innovation based on a simple idea: When the siren or the bell goes off, volunteers abandon their work-a-day jobs and run to the affected dwelling to put it out the fire one way or another.

Today, it’s a similar, old-fashioned drill, but it’s more complex and in many respects demands more from its firefighters.

Additionally, as we saw last week, the firefighters and ambulance operators have taken on still another job: educating young people about fire safety.

At Penn London Elementary School we saw West Grove firefighter Lisa Glass dress herself for fire duty in front of several classes of primary age children. In an adjacent room, Joey Nash and Mac Swain, also of West Grove Fire Company, gave a demonstration of the tools they use to enter a burning dwelling and bring down the flames.

They deserve our praise and respect for providing this valuable service which, incidentally, they did not get paid for.

As firefighter Mike Miller said at the time, “If it saves one life, it’s worth it all.”

We also have to praise the 10 or so other members of the West Grove company who showed up to lend support. While they were not called upon directly to give demonstrations, they offered supplementary comments and were ready to leave at any moment for a call.

Fast forward 277 years from Franklin’s original team, and we can see complexity of modern-day firefighting involves even more than educating and responding to the whistle. There are the costs, the training and the availability of volunteers.

Two-and-a-half centuries ago the fire company stocked up on buckets and a wagon or two.

Today, as spectators can see as the trucks respond to a call, the equipment one fire company possesses is valued in the millions of dollars. Accumulating the cash to purchase a new truck, maintain the hoses, keep the power flowing to the fire house and acquire modern technical innovations keeps these volunteers busy weekend after weekend. It also demands generous understanding from their local government officials who must face the uncomfortable task of imposing taxes to support this valuable service.

The second component of firefighting that has changed since Franklin’s time is the training.

A fire company can’t just tap some guy on the street and hope he wants to serve. The crew must attend training sessions and, in some cases, come through the ranks of junior firefighters starting as young as high school. They must learn how to stay alive, how to use their equipment and what the protocols of firefighting are -- not to mention building courage and keeping fit.

Finally, in a society where more people work miles from their homes rather than down the street from the firehouse in a small town, finding people who can drop what their doing to hop on the truck becomes ever more difficult.

In southern Chester County, where wealth is gained from executive jobs in Wilmington, Philadelphia or New York, there is a diminishing supply of people who can get there fast enough to help or even change their clothes for the task at hand.

The result is that those who show up to fight the fires are usually local residents working at jobs where they have the wherewithal to leave for emergencies.

That leads us to the moral of the story:

Firefighters deserve support both social and financial. For employers, that means letting them out and not docking their pay when the whistle blows. For legislators, it means keeping the money stream going to save lives and keep their companies up to date.

And for the general public, it means holding these heroes in high regard and taking seriously their messages of safety and fire prevention.

The Sun also published an article about the fire company's well-known fire prevention program:

See the Fire Prevention Article link below.

We thank the Avon Grove Sun for this coverage. We also thank the community for its continuing support of the fire company.

The West Grove Fire Company covers nearly 68 square miles of first due fire territory, including all of West Grove Borough and Penn and New London Townships. Additionally, the WGFC covers most of London Grove Township, in areas roughly west of a point just east of the Avon Grove Charter School. The fire company covers most of Franklin and London Britain townships, covering points west of a line running roughly along Auburn Road (north to south). Our district runs from the Delaware/Maryland border in the south, all the way north to the northern edges of London Grove and Penn Townships. The ambulance also covers a portion of Londonderry Township (mostly south and east from Cochranville), adding another 20 square miles to the total district size.

Tax deductible donations to support the fire company can be made electronically on this website at http://www.wgfc.org/content/donations/ or can be mailed to the West Grove Fire Company at PO Box 201, West Grove, PA, 19390.