Woodbury Firefighters Serve Gourmet Dinner to Raffle Winners

WOODBURY – Firefighters in the Woodbury Volunteer Fire Department cooked and served an elegant multi-course gourmet feast to winners of the famed annual Red Raffle Dinner with Firemen on Saturday October 5^th in the Emergency Services Building, 25 Quassuk Road.

The dinner was interrupted twice due to emergency calls that had firemen jump from their dinner table duty as hosts, pull on gear and climb onto trucks: one for an automatic smoke alarm tripped by a burned meal in a North Main Street residence and the other for an overturned vehicle on Railtree Hill Road. Neither resulted in injuries. Sadly however the ice cream to be served along with other Red Raffle deserts melted in the truck of the deputy chief onscene for the vehicle incident. Fire Chief Janet B.Morgan consoled the children at the dinner, saying “We’ll make sure all the little ones get ice cream delivered to them at home.”

The Red Raffle is a highlight of the fire department’s fall carnival August 29^th to 31^st in Hollow Park. The funds from the raffle are used to buy equipment not covered in the town budget. The two winners enjoying the multicourse dinner of prime rib or chicken were Alysia Cayer of Bristol, the corporate controller for the Shaker Automotive Group, and her family, and Ralph Allen of Southbury, an IBM executive, and his family. Allen was representing his son Craig Allen of Woodbury, the actual winner who could not attend.

The Allen family also received limo pickup from their Sherman Hill home via firetruck Engine 4 while the Cayer family received a tour of Woodbury in firetruck Engine 8. As the guests alighted, firefighters presented all the women with roses. Floral bouquets were handed to the winners at the end of the evening as well. During the course of the event, Chief Morgan did a presentation of the department’s involvement with the town and discussed a breakdown of the 355 responses last year.