current events firegeezer on 22 Oct 2007 08:39 am
Monday Morning In Maine - Etna, part 5
WE HAVE SPENT THE PAST FIVE DAYS talking about the strange situation in Etna, Maine, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE. If your computer’s been in the shop for the past week, take a moment to run through those links and get up to speed on the story of what is now known around the world as the “YouTube Fire Department.”
Basically, the Town Board of Selectmen decided to eliminate the town’s fire department. Without telling the citizens that they were even thinking about this bizarre action, they secretly arranged to contract neighboring fire departments to cover their town. They will be paying cash outright for every response into the town limits.
Out of Service
The first anybody heard of this was last Wednesday when the Town Manager announced that the fire department was closed, effective immediately. Then she ordered all members of the department to go to the firehouse and turn in all their gear and equipment right away. They had a sheriff’s deputy on hand to collect it.
All of the equipment, building, vehicles are owned by the town government which is responsible for fire protection. The citizenry was completely blindsided by this and are understandably outraged. The only reason the Board of Selectmen would give the residents is that the Fire Chief, Rick Goodell, made one of those “response videos” that you see on YouTube all the time, and he also posted it there. He tells Firegeezer that this was cleared with the town’s legal staff first.
But if you have a personnel or insubordination problem with the Chief, you do NOT close down the entire department. There is a hidden agenda there and nobody knows what that might be. None of the FD members can even guess. Oh, did I mention it? Of the five Town Selectmen, one of them is an active member of the department and two others are former fire chiefs who resigned to run for the Selectman office.
They have scheduled a Town Meeting for 6:00 pm this evening to continue discussion and action on this Barnum and Bailey act. At first they tried to schedule it as an executive session, but the law doesn’t allow it. There promises to be quite a few townspeople showing up to participate in this one.
So what are all these dedicated volunteer firefighters doing for the good of their community? Well, their equipment has been snatched away by Barnum (or was it Bailey?) so they can’t help their neighbor if a fire occurs. But most of them are EMT’s and fortunately some of them work for a private ambulance service that provides the emergency care for the area.
So they have arranged to move an ambulance to be stationed in one of the member’s private driveway. If a medical emergency occurs, they will take the ambulance and respond to the scene. There is no questioning their dedication to helping out their townspeople despite the dopey decisions coming out of Town Hall.
Emergency medical care is standing by
on private property - beyond the reach
of the Town Board.
Read those past articles to learn more about how this situation came about and to find out more about the operation and apparatus of the department. And check back here for updates during the day. Later tonight we hope to be able to report on the outcome of the Town Meeting. Some irate voters have already begun the petition process to have the entire Board removed from office. But since the Board is up for election in March, just over four months from now, this will undoubtedly spill over until then.
