This commentary is intended specifically for the town of Newport, however, there are thousands of towns around the United States with the same problem.

In order to make my point I must first relate a more logical history. Years ago, when someone was seriously injured, the only chance of getting lifesaving care was at a major regional hospital which had all of the necessary staff and equipment to handle anything that was at the time medically feasible. The downside of that system was that major hospitals were (and still are) often hours away. Realizing that lives could be saved by providing a faster medical response, first smaller area hospitals were built to reduce the travel time to emergency room care.

Continuing that logic further, the now familiar EMT system brought the provider to the victim, saving further time, and at present, the “first responder” concept and defibrillators at airports and malls have brought response time to medical emergencies down to a few minutes or less. In general this type of system is known as decentralization and is the key to the current efficiency of medical emergency response.

All things considered, an emergency is an emergency and a fire is no exception. However, the evolution of fire response seems to have taken a different tack. In colonial days, neighbors formed bucket brigades and amazingly often managed to put out potentially catastrophic fires by extinguishing them while they were still small enough to be put out by bucket brigades.

Then hand-powered fire pumps were invented which could put a lot more water on a fire than a bucket brigade. The drawback was that they were expensive, so a town could usually only afford one, and so, often a fire was a significant distance away from the pump and consequently the fire was much more involved by the time the fire pump got there. Bucket brigades, through their rapid response, still provided a significant contribution to the survival rate of structures and lives.

Leaving out the middle of the story, we progress to today where every few years, we spend $400,000 or so, on a fire truck, which if you live somewhat near the firehouse is probably a great comfort. However, if you live out in the willie-wags (rural areas for your flatlanders), such a truck, parked in the central fire station, might just as well be a hundred miles away. Given an on-call fire department, when an alarm goes out, a driver has to go to the station to get the truck, even though the fire may be next door to his house.

Once the truck is started, it is handicapped by its size in that it must go very slow around corners, has exceptionally poor acceleration and in many cases around the lake, cannot negotiate the dirt roads to even get to the fire. To get to the far side of the lake on the paved roads takes more than 15 minutes.

As a former fireman, I and others, have arrived on the scene of several rural fires before any fire truck arrived, and if there had been so much as a garden hose or a bucket of water available, we could have extinguished, what was at the time, a very small fire. Virtually every incident resulted in the structure being fully involved by the time the first fire truck arrived and all were subsequently total losses.

In order to prevent such unnecessary loss in the future we must think along the lines of decentralization. Big cities spread their fire departments throughout the community to reduce response time. The town of Dixmont has a full- sized fire truck remotely housed in a building on Route 7 for that same purpose.

Admittedly there is a problem in the rural environment, of building a structure large enough to house a full-sized fire truck and keep it heated in the winter. A possible solution would be to purchase several smaller, much less expensive four-wheel drive vehicles with 150-300-gallon tanks and independently powered pumps (side note: using these pumps are also much more efficient in fighting grass and forest fires as the truck can move and pump at the same time). These could be located strategically around the lake, would be much easier to house and heat, and due to their strategic location, would greatly enhance the fire survivability of most rural structures.

There are firemen who live around the lake to drive the trucks, and landowners around the lake, who have indicated that they would be willing to donate land for winter structures to protect the tanks and water pumps from freezing.

In addition to providing a quick and efficient response, purchasing one of these trucks every couple of years would save about $200,000 over the average purchase interval of the larger trucks. Another benefit would be less wear and tear on the large and more expensive trucks so that they should not need to be replaced for a very long time.

Thomas Hart is a former fireman who lives in Newport.