By Larry King
The Philadelphia Inquirer
BENSALEM TOWNSHIP, Pa. — Bensalem Township on Monday suspended the operations of one of its six volunteer fire companies, saying the leadership of Union Fire Company needed to be replaced.
Public Safety Director Fred Haran blamed long-standing but mostly unspecified leadership deficiencies for undermining the township’s confidence in the fire company.
Harran said he had arranged for 911 calls to no longer be routed to the Union company starting at noon Monday. Two other volunteer companies would share in covering Union’s territory, Harran said, an area along State Road near the Delaware River.
Harran stressed that the unusual move “is not a shutdown. It’s a suspension” that can be reversed if the company’s leaders are replaced.
For now, he said, Union is “a firefighting company with no fires to fight.”
The fire company, in a letter sent late in the day to Township Solicitor Joseph W. Pizzo, blamed the suspension on a personal vendetta concocted by Harran.
Harran has been angry with the fire company since 2007, the letter said, when Vince Troisi, the Union fire chief, testified in a civil suit brought against the township.
Troisi’s testimony, which was not described in the letter, cast “Mr. Harran in unfavorable light,” the letter said.
“Mr. Harran, individually and on behalf of the township, is now taking the ultimate retaliatory action against the fire company,” the letter said.
If the suspension is not lifted by noon Thursday, the letter concluded, the company will take the township to court.
Union’s president, Capt. Steven Carmichael, was asked whether the dispute with Harran was personal.
“Mr. Harran has made it personal,” he said. “But my concern is that the people of the township get the fire service they deserve” from the company’s more than 30 volunteers.
Earlier in the day, Harran and Mayor Joseph DiGirolamo said no danger was posed to residents by the suspension. They said township officials would meet with affected citizens Thursday night to explain the changes in their coverage and reassure them they are safe.
Harran praised the company’s members as “loyal and dedicated,” but said “a culmination of numerous incidents and events . . . have resulted in a loss of confidence in the leadership” of the company.
Harran said, for example, that Union’s leaders had allowed trucks to go to fire scenes manned by only two firefighters, when four are needed for safety reasons. He declined to go into other specific allegations.
The company’s letter to Pizzo accused Harran and the township of retaliating against the company in various ways, most recently “by conducting and publicizing a bogus allegation of improper conduct in the handling of a fire” in April.
Recently, Harran has told the fire company that the investigation showed no wrongdoing, the letter said, but has refused to say so publicly. The township has also refused repeated Right to Know requests from the company for access to its file on the matter, the letter said.
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