Large grant awarded

A couple of Geauga County fire departments will get an equipment upgrade, thanks to a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant.

The Chardon and Burton departments together applied in February for $398,000 for new air packs and related software. The departments recently were jointly awarded a $334,000 grant.

The local share is 10 percent of the award, meaning about $17,000 from Chardon and $13,000 from

Burton, Chardon Chief Larry Gaspar said.

“We’re going to be able to get 26 brand new, stateof-the-art air packs, and then each air pack is going to come with two 45-minute

air bottles,” he told City Council at the Nov. 8 meeting.

The department’s current air packs date to 2002 and have undergone four upgrades.

“With our old packs, our low-air alarm goes off when there is 25 percent of the air left,” Gaspar said.

“The new packs will go

off when there’s 33 percent of the air left. And what they’re trying to do is give firefighters a little more time to get out of the structure once that alarm goes off.”

Along with the air packs come face masks and a certain number of voice amplifiers attached to the side of the masks.

“This allows firefighters to talk to each other in smoky conditions and also allows them to be able to hold a portable radio up to that amplifier, and they can talk with other firefighters in the structure and to the outside incident commander,” the chief said.

Each pack will have builtin hardware called a PakTracker firefighter locator system. It allows the commander to use a television screen to watch where firefighters are within a structure.

“The bad part about this is the software and the TV monitor for the incident command vehicle to be able to track where all the firefighters are in the building was part of the $64,000 that got cut out,” Gaspar said. “So the air packs will have the computer hardware built into them, but maybe at a later date we’ll be able to do something with (the software).”

Councilwoman Nancy McArthur asked why he thought the software was not included in the award.

Gaspar didn’t have a theory, but he noted that FEMA typically trims off items seen as nonessentials, and that a handful of Lake County departments sought $700,000 and received $600,000.

“We’re very fortunate to get this type of grant, because if we didn’t go after these types of monies, then we would have to fall back on the residents and the taxpayers in order to come up with the $175,000 that we’ll be using out of this,” he said. “It’s not additional taxes to our residents.”

Gaspar also thanked voters for passing a ballot issue Nov. 6 helping to fund the department.

The issue combined a 4-mill levy first approved in 2004 and a 1-mill tax added in 2012. Both were renewed in 2015 and were set to expire at the end of this year.

Last year, the combined levy yielded $758,573 for the department, which is a private corporation funded by the city, and Chardon and Claridon townships.