Rural Fire Departments in Northeastern Oklahoma
OKLAHOMA CITY – Fire departments throughout northeastern Oklahoma say they couldn’t operate without the cast-off military equipment they receive through the state’s Forestry Services Division, state Rep. Chuck Hoskin said Friday.
“Without those vehicles, we’d never have survived,” said Frank Kotoff, who retired after nine years as chief of the Diamond Head / Lone Chapel Fire Department in the northwestern corner of Mayes County.
Surplus military vehicles and equipment are “the only things that have kept us going,” echoed Charles Bowlin, chief of the Bowlin Springs Fire Protection Association in Craig County.
Approximately 900 rural fire departments across the state are using more than 8,800 surplus vehicles and pieces of equipment valued collectively at more than $150 million and acquired through the Federal Excess Personal Property and the Firefighter Property programs. That’s according to George Geissler, director of the Forestry Services Division of the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry. The value of the vehicles and equipment received annually in Oklahoma reportedly is between $13 million and $15 million.
An announcement last week that rural fire departments would no longer be allowed to acquire surplus military vehicles sparked a flurry of efforts at the federal and state levels to overturn that decision.
The ban reportedly arose from the belated enforcement of a policy established 25 years ago, during the administration of President George H.W. Bush. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Defense (DoD) signed an agreement in 1989 which decreed that all surplus Defense Department vehicles that did not meet federal emission standards had to be destroyed as they were retired from military service.
Reversal of the ban was announced Wednesday. The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), an arm of the Defense Department, will “immediately resume issuing military vehicles and equipment with an associated National Security Exemption to authorized law enforcement agencies and to DoD Fire Fighter Program recipients,” DLA spokeswoman Michelle McCaskill said in a statement.
However, the new arrangement will involve more red tape: The Defense Department will retain title to the surplus equipment so it can be destroyed when no longer useful.
Mark Goeller, fire management chief for the Agriculture Department, said that previously a rural fire department was able to sell its old equipment at auction. Now, though, the surplus vehicles and equipment must be “tracked and returned once they are no longer in use,” Oklahoma’s U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe said.
Justin Smith, chief of the Carselowey Community Volunteer Fire Department for the past couple of years, said they have a brush truck that’s a used 5-ton military vehicle equipped with a pair of 600-gallon water tanks. Carselowey VFD also has a 1-ton military truck. Both vehicles were acquired from Forestry Services, Smith said. “And we’re on the list for a 2½-ton capacity Army LMTV (light medium tactical vehicle),” he added.
Without the surplus military equipment program, “We’re out of business,” Smith said.
Membership dues in the Carselowey fire protection district are $50 per year. Non-members are charged $350 per fire run but fire district members are charged nothing on runs to suppress fires that break out on their property. Nor does the volunteer fire department charge anything when it responds to mutual-aid calls, where they assist other fire departments. “Most of our calls our mutual aid,” Smith said.
For example, last winter they joined several other fire departments in the region to fight a “huge fire” at Spinnaker Point on Grand Lake. “It was 8 degrees and the wind was blowing about 40 miles an hour,” Smith recalled. And this spring Carselowey firefighters helped battle a blaze at White Oak, he said.
Carselowey has eight volunteer firefighters. Their service area is between Vinita, Ketchum and Big Cabin, Smith indicated.
The Carselowey VFD annual fund-raising dinner generated about $4,000, and they receive a few donations, Smith said. The department received about $3,500 from the Cherokee Nation plus a $4,474 operational grant from the Agriculture Department’s Forestry Services Division last year.
Identical operational grants also were awarded to fire departments throughout Oklahoma, including the Adair Fire Department, the Big Cabin Fire Department, Bluejacket Volunteer Fire Department, Bowlin Springs Fire Protection Association, Centralia Volunteer Fire Company, Chelsea Fire Department, Diamond Head / Lone Chapel Fire Department, Northwest Rogers County Fire Protection District, as well as the Vinita and Welch fire departments.
The grants were derived from funds appropriated by the Legislature to assist fire departments in communities of less than 10,000 population, related Hoskin, D-Vinita.
Sonny Winfrey, previously chief of the Bluejacket VFD for 14 years, said their department has used surplus military equipment – including trucks, pickups, and water tanks, all procured through the Forestry Services program – for a long time.
“We’ve used them for years, and we’ve had good luck with them,” he said. “It’s a great help to us.” Repairs and modifications are performed by district personnel, he said, except for diesel engine repairs, which are performed by a diesel mechanic.
The all-volunteer department has about 15 firefighters who respond to fire calls within about an eight-mile radius of Bluejacket, Winfrey said.
Virtually every fire department in the Bluejacket area – including Welch, Centralia, Afton, Vinita and Big Cabin – relies on the surplus military equipment program, Winfrey said.
The Chelsea Fire Department has a 1968 four-wheel drive Kaiser Jeep acquired through Forestry Services that it uses as a grass rig, Chief Matt Fraley said. The department also received three surplus military water tanks that it converted into one 1,500-gallon tank for fire suppression efforts, he said.
Chelsea tapped into the military surplus program “several times in the past,” Fraley said. “They kept us in equipment for many years.”
The Chelsea department is staffed with 17 volunteers who fight fires in a 100 square-mile area in Rogers, Craig and Mayes counties, he said.
The Bowlin Springs volunteer fire department has a 2-ton military truck that’s been converted into a rural pumper truck, Chief Charles Bowlin said. The pumper has a 16-foot-long bed on which department personnel have installed a pair of 600-gallon water tanks that are connected by a pipe, he said. The two tanks, like the truck chassis, were military surplus acquired from the Forestry Services Division.
Previously the department had a ¾-ton surplus military truck they used for fighting brush fires, Bowlin recalled.
“We’ve been able to do most of the work on these vehicles ourselves,” he said. “We have guys who weld,” for example.
Occasionally, though, they have to buy replacement parts, such as cutoff valves. Bowlin said that while thumbing through a catalogue recently he came across a fire hose nozzle that cost $485. The hoses, too, are expensive, “so we have a kit to repair our hoses whenever possible.”
The Bowlin Springs fire department is staffed by eight volunteer firefighters who serve the southwestern corner of Craig County; Bowlin Springs is seven miles north of Chelsea. “We have a lot of ranch land around here” that’s susceptible to grass fires in the summer months, when it routinely gets hot and dry in Oklahoma, Bowlin said.
The surplus DoD equipment enables rural fire departments in Oklahoma to protect lives and property, which in turn has a direct effect on insurance premiums, Kotoff noted.
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