| Today, your fire department consists of three fire
stations, four pumper engines, one Rescue-Pumper, one ladder, the
Chief, four Captains, twenty-eight firefighters, twenty-five on-call
persons, and a secretary. This has been the same size and configuration
of the Fire Department for the past thirty years. Town meeting of
1987 established a compliment of four more firefighters. The four
were hired and subsequently not reappointed as retirements returned
the ranks to thirty-two. This decrease of strength was the result
of fallout from Proposition 2 ½. The department today stands
at thirty-two members.
Over the years many changes have occurred within and to the town.
During the fifty years spanning 1950 to 2000, the town grew from
a bucolic 10,594 to over 31,000 today. This growth brought with
it a need for new schools, which is not yet satisfied even today.
Hundreds of new roads were laid and now require attention from the
Highway Department. A source of new water is always being sought.
Demands for sewerage pushed the town out of the sewage treatment
plant at Ward Hill and into a regional agreement with a plant in
Westborough. During the past ten years, the number of housing starts
has averaged over 225 per year.
The Police Department was doubled up with the Fire Department in
a building that at the time was not of sufficient size for either
department individually. In 1974, the Police Department was afforded
a new building adjacent to Town Hall. At the same time, the Fire
Headquarters was remodeled to better serve the needs of the department.
The Fire department has operated from five to eight vehicles over
the past twenty years. The department maintained two brush fire
trucks during a period when brush fires were serious matters that
burned for days at a time. The apparatus compliment currently consists
of one pumper/engine per station, one pumper/rescue, one ladder
truck., and one reserve engine set up as a brush fire truck.
Sprinkler systems are considered a silent firefighter. Sprinklers
detect small incipient fires and hold the fire down until the Fire
Department can respond and completely extinguish the fire. Laws
have been enacted requiring installation of sprinklers in new buildings
over 7,500 square feet. Currently, laws are being promulgated to
include all buildings over 7,500 square feet. This law will undoubtedly
create a workload to bring compliance for the buildings currently
in place that are not sprinklered.
Home building materials and products have changed from traditional
wood to everything but. Plastics make up more than half of every
house built today. Decks, passage doors, bath fixtures, piping,
home furnishings, and clothing are all petrochemical plastics of
one form or another. The burn rates of these materials are ten times
greater than the burn rate of wood.
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