STATter 911

Video of the day: From Putney, VT on Saturday night, the Putney General Store burns. Read more. The owner says he will rebuild one of the oldest general stores in Vermont.

Rain makes for a busy night

DC Fire & EMS crews had another long mutual aid run Sunday night. They joined other mutual aid companies in sending technical rescue support to a collapse of a home in Chesapeake Beach, MD (Calvert County) with at least one person trapped. That's a 34-mile run. DC also sent crews to help out in the aftermath of Thursday's tornado in Stafford County, VA.

There were a lot of trees down in the Washington area. We watched crews from Alexandria Station 203 deal with one that took out part of the top floor of a home on Old Dominion Boulevard.

Between 10 and 11:00 PM, Fauquier County was dealing with multiple trees down in the Orlean area.

By midnight more than three inches of rain had fallen in Alexandria and portions of Fairfax County. Once again too much for Cameron Run at Huntington. I had been on Fenwick Street and along Arlington Terrace around 8:30 PM and there was no flooding. Two hours later Fairfax County had a command post set up and was working on evacuations.

Remembering in Brockton

Photo by Jimmy Daly, Daly Images

We mentioned back in March, on the 67th anniversary of the tragic Strand Theater fire in Brockton, MA, a new memorial was planned to honor the 13 firefighters who died in that fire. The dedication of the monument was Saturday. Click here to read more about the ceremony.

The picture above is of 93-year-old Edward Burrell, retired Brockton chief, and the only surviving member of the crew that fought the fire. The statue was made in the likeness of Chief Burrell.

The picture above is by Jimmy Daly who is always on top of things from Massachusetts (and beyond) for STATter 911. Jimmy expects to soon have a series of pictures from the dedication on his Daly Images site.

Jimmy also alerted us, but we failed to provide a link, to pictures from a fire a week ago in Union City, NJ. Some excellent, very early photos shot of a 2nd-alarm in a commercial building.

The wheel of misfortune in Detroit

We have mentioned before that Detroit has been going through a round of "firehouse roulette". This rotating closing of fire stations is something we saw in Washington, DC in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Just like in Washington, Detroit is dealing with fatal fires near where stations are closed. FireGeezer has the latest example.

A pair of fires in SC

Pat Walsh is an old friend, long retired from DC. Pat has been in South Carolina for 14 years where he has been a volunteer at Murrells Inlet/Garden City Fire & Rescue. The department is about 12 miles south of Myrtle Beach with 38 career firefighters and approximately 20 volunteers.

Pat sent these pictures from two fires. The first was on Saturday, May 3 and the second one the next day. If I have it right, the pictures above are from the first fire, in a single-family home. The second fire, in the pictures below, was in multiple single-family homes. It destroyed two of them and left the other two with heat damage.

For more news from someone who specializes in South Carolina coverage, check out Grant Mishoe's SConFire.com.

# posted by Dave Statter @ 1:01 AM