OKTIBBEHA COUNTY — Three Oktibbeha County fire departments received approval from the Mississippi Forestry Commission this week for thousands of dollars in grant money to pay for new equipment.
The Central Oktibbeha Fire Department will receive a $4,276.53 federal Volunteer Fire Assistance grant, and the Sturgis/District 4 and Oktoc/District 5 fire departments will each receive $3,807.80. The new equipment will increase each fire district’s capacity to fight forest fires, and much of Oktibbeha County outside Starkville is forested.
Central Oktibbeha will purchase a drone in order to watch fires from above and plan the best way to attack them, as well as some new chainsaws and firefighting suits, Chief Joe Pennell said. Sturgis and Oktoc will each receive protective gear, new chainsaws and cases and, most importantly, backpack leaf blowers for firefighters to wear and use to deflect flames back toward material that has already burned, Sturgis Chief Greg Wall said.
Volunteer fire departments are already short-staffed, with 24 on the Central Oktibbeha roster and 13 on Sturgis.
“Some folks work out of state, some folks work out of town, and when there’s an emergency, certainly not all of them are able to respond,” Wall said.
The backpack leaf blowers will partially make up for that shortage of volunteers, county firefighter training coordinator Austin Check said.
“The beauty of this equipment is you’re taking a very manual process and now, using those leaf blowers, taking a lot of the work out of it,” he said.
Thanks to the state budget cuts, four counties have to share two wildfire bulldozers, which cut a line through a wildfire’s fuel source to stop it in its tracks, Pennell said. The nearest bulldozer will respond to a fire in Choctaw, Oktibbeha, Clay and Lowndes counties if necessary.
One of the bulldozers is sometimes stationed at the Mississippi Forestry Commission location on Highway 12 just west of Starkville, underneath an unused fire tower, Oktibbeha County Fire Coordinator Kirk Rosenhan said.
The Maben/District 3 Fire Department also applied for a $4,500 grant but did not receive it. The Mississippi Forestry Commission approves grant requests based on a variety of criteria, including the fire district’s population density and how many fires they respond to, assistant fire chief Keith Beatty said.
The commission has staff throughout the state that respond to fires if the first response from local fire departments is not enough, said Jason Scott, the commission’s director of information and outreach.
Rural fire departments do not receive any money from the state.
“They use these grants to keep their equipment up to date so they can fight fires to the best of their ability, so these federal grants are extremely important,” said Scott.
Rosenhan said many of the county’s trucks meant to fight brush fires are surplus government property provided by the forestry commission.
“Not only are they free, (although) obviously we have to worry about fuel and maintenance, but they get us a number of vehicles that will be used for rural and forest fire operations, and we couldn’t afford that on our own,” Rosenhan said.
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