Great Story Of Volunteer Firefighters In Texas

Today, on 9-11, we memorialize the FDNY (NYC fire department) and their terrible losses on 9-11-01. All those firefighters were paid/career firefighters. Most of the big cities and even smaller cities have a full time fire department but in reality, most of the country is protected by volunteer firefighters. They respond from their homes and respond either to the fire station or the fire scene.
Volunteers firefighters usually don't get paid, or if they do, it's minimal pay and people don't do it for the money. Most volunteers do it for the excitement or helping the community they live in. Heck, even in New York City, they have 9 volunteer fire departments within the city limits.
I've been a volunteer firefighter in Oconomowoc, Maple Bluff and Lowell WI. and in Minot Rural and Dunseith, ND..
anyways, there is a very good article in the Austin Statesman out of Texas about the sacrifices volunteer firefighters have made in the massive Texas wild fires. These include firefighters who lost their homes while trying to save the lives and homes of their neighbors.
From the Austin Statesman: Fire prevailed in the stand for Charolais Drive. The men of Station 3 heard a voice on their radios: "Go!"
Alan Donaldson, a captain with the Bastrop Fire Department, hustled back to his truck, Tender 33. He stowed the hose and steered uneasily south.
Donaldson and the other volunteer firefighters had been on the fire Sunday since the page that activated every department in the county. A spirited wind bent the tops of the pines as men and women from Bastrop, Heart of the Pines and other departments hurried from their homes in the woods and pushed north of Texas 21.
Donaldson had left his corner lot in Circle D Estates, a small patch of land on Comanche Drive that reminded him of boyhood visits to the solace of Montana and Wyoming. The 45-year-old maintenance technician at Camp Swift with a tattoo of a dragon on his arm liked living in the pines, where nights swallowed the noise and glare of civilization and buried it in the needles.
But last Sunday, there was no peace in the forest.
After the order to evacuate, Donaldson led another tender and a Bastrop brush truck along Charolais, toward FM 1441.
The smoke grew as dense as tar. He could barely discern the woods from the road.
"Then the fire was behind us," Donaldson said.
"Then," he said, "it was on us."
No wildland firefighter wants to reach into the small bag attached to his gear, the one that holds his shiny silver fire shelter. Deployment represents a concession to the Fates.
"It's a commitment," Donaldson said. "Once you go into a shelter, you don't come out until somebody comes and gets you
The firefighters with the Heart of the Pines VFD dwelled on small victories.
On three occasions last week, the 34,000-acre Bastrop fire licked at Station 2, a garage of corrugated metal on Texas 71, deep in the woods between Bastrop and Smithville.
The firefighters suppressed it each time.
Patrick Beasley, a 27-year-old lieutenant with a Texas A&M Aggies ring on his finger, left his house on Cottletown Road when the initial page informed him of an emerging brush fire on Charolais Drive. He'd been clearing debris on his property in the rolling land southeast of the fire's origin while his wife was at work in Round Rock and his 1-year-old daughter was with her grandparents in Liberty.
Beasley and his partner, John Banning, answered a rescue call that afternoon on Cardinal Drive, near the source of the fire.
They parked their brush truck at the address. They found no one. Fire was everywhere.
Beasley and Banning noticed two cars next door. They drove to the house and checked it for people. The house was empty.
The firefighters put water on the exterior until fire encroached on every side. They watched it destroy the house. Then a structure nearby exploded, blocking their path out.
http://www.statesman.com/news/local/for-firefighters-losing-houses-was-personal-1838236.html
In Clark County, NV. we have several volunteer fire departments/fire stations in the rural areas of the County.
Thank goodness we have the volunteers to serve and protect the majority of the United States and we appreciate the services and sacrifices they provide.