Copyright 2005 The Birmingham News
All Rights Reserved
By KENT FAULK
Staff Writer
The Birmingham News
GARDEN CITY, N.J. - This tiny Cullman County town has given a used firetruck to a Louisiana parish where 22 fire vehicles were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
Katrina demolished the equipment in all but one of Plaquemines Parish’s eight volunteer fire departments. Since then, the one parish fire department that escaped the storm’s wrath - Belle Chasse Volunteer Fire Department - has provided most fire protection for the southernmost parish.
“All the other departments lost just about everything they had,” said Rudy Sampey of the Belle Chasse department.
Sampey and four other members of the department came Monday to Garden City to pick up a firetruck the Cullman County town of about 580 is donating. The Louisiana group on Sunday had met with West Virginia volunteer firefighters to receive another donated firetruck. A few other trucks also have been donated, Sampey said.
It hasn’t been decided which department in the parish will get the red 1977 Ford pumper truck, with a 750-gallon tank, that Garden City donated, Sampey said.
Sampey said the truck will make it possible to spread equipment across the 90-mile-long parish. “We can’t afford to have our equipment 50 miles down the road,” he said.
Garden City put the truck up for sale for $14,000 last summer after it got a new truck.
Eddie Seibert, chief of the 18-member Garden City Volunteer Fire Department, said officials decided after hurricanes Katrina and Rita to donate the truck to a department in need. They contacted the Cullman County Emergency Management Agency, he said.
Phyllis Little, director of the Cullman County EMA, said she put out a notice in an in-state email group that the firetruck was available. There were no takers so she sent out another e-mail opening it up to out-of-state departments.