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North Lima community remembers fallen firefighters who died in 1940 accident
NORTH LIMA
The July 21, 1940, accident that killed three firefighters nearly faded, forgotten, into history.
That is until Beaver Township Fire Chief Russ Osborne stumbled across an old article about the event and decided it was time to pay tribute to the last of the community’s firefighters to die in the line of duty.
“We dedicate this memorial to their memory and to all firefighters – past, present and future – who venture into the unknown on every call to protect life and property,” reads a plaque at the newly dedicated memorial that stands near the veterans memorial at the corner of state Routes 164 and 165.
A July 22, 1940, Vindicator article details the grisly event: “Fire Chief Earl Brubaker and Fireman Homer McCormick were instantly killed and five other volunteer firemen of the Beaver Township department were injured, four seriously, when their fire truck, said to be speeding at 80 miles an hour, careened off a curve and rolled over several times, about two miles south of here at 7:30 p.m. Sunday.”
“The firemen were answering a call to a barn fire outside their own territory when the accident occurred, transforming their new $7,000 fire truck into a mass of battered and twisted junk,” the article reads.
Osborne said there are two accounts of what happened on the stretch of road known as Snyder’s Bend: One is that an oncoming car driving in the middle of the road caused the truck to swerve, and the other is that the firetruck swerved after a car trying to pass another car veered into the truck’s path.
“The truck gouged a piece of wood out of a telephone pole and plunged along the ditch for about 300 feet or more before stopping on the road,” The Vindicator reported. “Some of the firemen, it was reported, were flung as high as the telephone wires bordering the road by the force of the crash. McCormick was virtually decapitated.”
Firefighter Roy Miner died soon after the accident. Injured in the accident were Emmett Haas, Howard Hartman, Clarence Seidner and Max Haddaway. The Vindicator wrote that Haas was “nearly scalped.”
The truck was partly to blame for the severity of the accident, Osborne said. Back then, firetrucks didn’t have roofs or seat belts; firefighters hung onto the sides and back of the truck on the way to fires.
Osborne remembers riding on the back of a fire engine, gripping a metal pole, in the early 1980s as a Boardman firefighter and being told that it would be the last ride of its kind.
Although today’s firefighters travel with safety features such as seat belts, thermal-imaging cameras and air packs, and the trucks are of course enclosed, Osborne says that doesn’t make firefighters much safer.
“We still lose 100 firefighters a year, despite the safety improvements and [that there] are less fires,” he said of nationwide statistics. “It’s a whole lot safer, supposedly, but we still keep dying.”
The memorial, he hopes, will bring “attention to the fact that firefighters are still out there, seven days a week, and it never gets less dangerous.”