A Blast From the Past: Butcher examines what can be done in five minutes

Date: 10/13/2009

By Amanda Butcher

Special to Reminder Publications



In five minutes, one can read a chapter of a book (two if it's a good book). In five minutes, I can write a paragraph about my weekend. In five minutes, a small stove fire can spread. I talked to someone a few weeks ago about what they knew about the fire department in East Longmeadow, and they said that the trucks will be there within five minutes. By then, the fire shouldn't have spread too far.

The East Longmeadow Fire Department was established in the 1920s, when it was located near the Town Hall, and it was combined with the police station.

The first fire trucks were homemade, said a former volunteer firefighter. People in East Longmeadow would donate their old trucks and paint them red to make them ready to fight a fire.

The tradition of having red fire trucks dates back to the 1800s when fire stations wanted their trucks to be the shiniest and their color the best. Red, being the most expensive color, was the choice paint for fire trucks, because that showed superiority to other stations. Most cars on the road at that time were black, and red was the color that stood out.

The first new, shiny, red fire truck that East Longmeadow purchased was bought in 1924 straight from a factory that planned to ship the truck to San Francisco. It was shipped instead to our town, which was in need of a fire truck that could be admired. It was retired in 1957 when trucks started getting bigger and better, demoted to spraying toxins on poison ivy and poison oak in the back of the high school.

I have always wondered why East Longmeadow has lime green fire trucks when my favorite color for them is red. After some research, I found that around the 1980s, a study was conducted about the color of fire trucks which proved that it was safest to have brightly colored trucks so that they would be easily seen at night. Safety was the reason for East Longmeadow's change from the traditional red to green. Trucks were getting much safer, because before this time, firefighters rode on the back of the trucks. Now, there were seatbelts in the cab!

The trucks were becoming bigger and safer, but the station wasn't growing with them. Chief Richard Brady told me that the floors were sagging from the weight of the new trucks, and the station was just getting altogether too small. Besides, heading to put out a fire on the other side of town coming from the rotary during rush hour isn't exactly the safest thing either. In 1997, this was remedied. The station was moved to its current centralized location on Somers Road.

I was sitting in math class a few days ago when I heard sirens. My brother, who was on the bus at the time, said that there had been a fire in a dumpster somewhere on the route to school. Lucky our firefighters are so adept at getting to the site of a fire so quickly, he said, or else the barn would have burned, too!