Fire Chief: Keep Our Trucks In Mind When Parking on Street

Vehicles parked in precarious places and making roads nearly impassable have been a part of this borough for quite some time now.

However, as firefighters, we face a more interesting challenge that I hope some will take to heart when they park their cars in the road this evening before they go to bed.

In the middle of the night the Fire Department is often called out for fire alarms, Co2 alarms and fires. When our men and women are piloting these  30-foot long 8-foot wide trucks through the narrow streets, poorly parked cars have become our biggest obstacle.

It is understood many homes where built without driveways, too close together, and parking on the road is the only option, however before your car is parked tonight, take a look is the neighbor already parked across the street or in a way that if you park it may make the road so narrow it would be difficult to get a firetruck through?

You may ask: "Well how do garbage trucks and public works trucks get by?"

These trucks mostly go by at times when residents are leaving for work or have left for work already so the amount of cars parked on the street is far less than the cars left on the roads between the hours of 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.

We go by 24 hours a day, seven days a week, when we do the luxury of honking until someone comes out and moves the car is not an option.

Obviously, if we are going to your house for a call and your car is the precariously parked one, it is not such a big issue due to the fact that we can stretch a line, however think about a situation where it is the house down the street that we are responding to and it is your car that held the firetrucks up.

Could you live with the fact that you were responsible for the delayed response of the fire department?

The police cannot be everywhere all the time. No one wants to live in a town where there are ordinances that make everything illegal.

Merely utilize a little common sense everytime you park your cars at night on narrow streets and make sure that a truck as large as a firetruck could get through safely and quickly and your act may have one day inadvertently saved a life.