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FEMA Awards Lowellville Fire Department with $12,000 Grant
Funds also will be used to send 2 firefighters through training program
LOWELLVILLE
After the Lowellville Fire Department experienced failure with a nozzle on one of its trucks last year, fire Chief Al Boggia said he realized it was time to update some of the equipment on his trucks.
While the two trucks owned by the department are in perfect working condition, Boggia said some of the equipment on the trucks likely was built in the 1970s and needs to be replaced.
“Once you know stuff is old, you know it’s going to break down,” he said.
“Like I said, we had a failure on a nozzle in a fire just last year, so you start to worry about that. It’s time to replace this stuff so that doesn’t happen again.”
Fortunately, during the first week of August, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency awarded the fire department a $12,964 grant from its Assistance to Firefighters Grants program.
Boggia said this money will be used to update the department’s truck equipment and send two firefighters through a training program.
The department will spend about $11,000 of the grant on new equipment for the fire trucks and $1,600 for firefighter training.
The department has one year to spend the grant money. Boggia said he estimates the department will have the new equipment for the trucks in two months and the firefighters will go to training sometime in winter.
FEMA had about $289 million to distribute among thousands of U.S. fire departments with its Assistance to Firefighters Grants program. Donald Mobley, fire program specialist with FEMA, said FEMA received nearly 12,000 applications from across the country in 2013 for this grant.
He said FEMA only selected about 1,800 of those applications to receive grant help as of this summer.
“It’s a highly competitive program,” Mobley said.
“We fund, on average, about one in eight of the applications we get. The fire departments will get rewarded if their application shows they really have need, and if it’s a reasonable request. The more specific an application, the better.”
Mobley said FEMA tends to distribute between $1,000 and $1 million to each awarded department with the grant.
Boggia said the Lowellville department applies for this grant every year and, since 2006, he said the department has received about $200,000 from the FEMA program overall.
“It’s increased our training and made our department better,” he said.
“It increased the number of firefighters we can have; it’s a real great program. I’m sure it’s done a lot for other departments.”