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A Safety Message from GVFD

Smoke Detectors Save Lives
While 95% of American homes have at least one smoke alarm, more than a third of these alarms are inoperable because of dead or missing batteries. Roughly 70% of the more than 3500 annual home fire deaths in the USA result from fires in homes with no smoke alarms or no working smoke alarms.

As emergency responders, it is difficult to be involved in incidents in which people suffer or even lose their lives when such tragedies could so easily be avoided.

The Grass Valley Fire Department urges all residents to install smoke detectors if absent and maintain their current devices on a regular basis. We suggest replacing batteries each time you change your clocks.

Never ‘borrow’ batteries from your detectors or otherwise disable them, even temporarily. Test your detectors periodically to ensure they are in good working order. Our mission at the Grass Valley Fire Department is to protect the lives and property of our citizens. Please help us in this effort; you and your family’s lives may depend on it.

A Day at the Firehouse

People often ask us about our daily routine during our shifts at the firehouse. This is a welcome question because it gives us the opportunity to dispel an old misconception that firefighters just hang around the station playing checkers waiting for calls!

Our firefighters work 48-hour shifts that start and end at 8:00 am. During the course of the shift our number one priority is to respond to emergency calls, while everything else that goes on during the day is really designed to better prepare us for those emergency situations. For example, we train and drill for two hours each day in an ongoing effort to maintain critical task proficiency and to learn new skills.

We also start each day by doing daily and weekly inspections and maintenance on all of our apparatus and equipment to ensure readiness for any situation. Additionally we are responsible for fire safety inspections, our respective collateral duties, special projects, station maintenance, physical training, and many other duties that keep the department ready for any emergency.

As a progressive fire department, it is our goal to be better than we were the day before and this commitment demands a full day’s work from all of our on duty personnel.

Firefighters Contain Potential Interface Fire

On a hot summer day this past August, Grass Valley Fire Marshall Greg Burke noted a column of dark smoke coming from a known residential area and initiated a First Alarm response. Arriving engines found heavy fire showing from a residence on Leahy Road with extension into the surrounding vegetation.

In a collaborative effort between Grass Valley Fire Department, Nevada County Consolidated Fire District and CDF, the vegetation fire was contained and the fire confined to the structure of origin. Despite an aggressive interior attack the partial log home burned so intensely that extinguishment took over two hours.

The long, hot firefight took its toll with two firefighters having to be transported to the hospital for heat stress. Unfortunately the heavy flames and smoke damaged the home to a point where it could not be salvaged. Investigators later determined the fire started in the garage and had

A Major Challenge - Replacing Truck 2

Our 1980 aerial ladder truck is growing tired after 26 years of dependable service to Grass Valley. As the only ladder truck in Western Nevada County, Truck 2 has played a significant role in the control of nearly every major structure fire of the past quarter century, not only in the City of Grass Valley but in our surrounding community as well. Its 75-foot aerial can reach trapped victims quickly then attack the fire with 1500 gallons of water a minute through its elevated master stream. Time has taken a toll on this fine piece of apparatus however, and reliability is becoming an issue. Our 75-foot ladder is inadequate to fully meet the fire and rescue needs of proposed building projects such as the hospital addition or the Idaho Maryland Mine. Additionally, the All-Hazard mission of today’s Fire Service requires specialized equipment and technology that is beyond the capability of the existing truck to support.

Now that Truck 2 is approaching the end of its front line service life, it is time to plan for its replacement. A new 100-foot aerial ladder truck will cost well over a half-million dollars and so presents a major budgeting challenge for our relatively small department. We are working on several approaches to manage and possibly augment funding of this expenditure, including leasepurchase arrangements; FEMA grants; donations and bequeathments such as the generous gift of the Everett Champion estate which fully funded our last fire engine purchase; and conditioning those projects whose buildings would require a longer aerial for fire/rescue.

We look forward to the day we park a shiny new 100-foot aerial ladder truck in the front line apparatus bay at Station Two and give Truck-2 some well-deserved rest as our reserve ladder; resting yes, but still ready to serve our citizens should it be called upon once again to respond.