The Fire Chief’s Blog

Today Assistant Chief Scott Taylor attended the Spring Grant Awards ceremony hosted by the Eden Prairie Foundation.  The foundation is a non-profit group that raises money to support various groups in our city. 

Over the years the Foundation has issued grants totaling more that $100,000 to the Fire Department.  The grants have been for such items as our first Thermal Imaging Camera, defibrillators and a joint effort with the EP Lions and Ep Moms Club for a Safety Awareness Trailer to name just a few.

This Spring we applied for a received a $5,000 grant for radios to enable our CERT members to communicate with our command and control structure during an emergency.  Scott Taylor’s role as one of my Assistant Chiefs is to oversee the CERT program.  The grant will fund radios, a vital communications tool that will serve our CERT members well when they are called into action to support emergency response during a disaster situation.  We believe that having a thriving CERT program is another valuable tool available within our Public Safety strategy in the event of a wide-scale emergency.

 We are fortunate to have such great support in our community for our initiatives.  Without the support of groups like the Eden Prairie Foundation our operations would not be as robust as they are today.  Thank you to the members and supporters of the Eden Prairie Foundation and to the other community groups that tirelessly raise money to support the high quality of life we enjoy in this outstanding community!

No real blog action from me this week as it has been a crazy one.  Earlier this week we were up early, 0400 hrs on Wednesday to kick-off our Women’s Fire Service Expo.  Firefighter/Administrative Assistant Kim hanlon has been the driving force behind this program.  The idea is to have a one day program for women interested in exploring becoming a firefighter.  The morning media blitz has resulted in good interest.

Next up was our bid opening for a replacement ladder truck.  After that was an all afternoon training session on some new radios that will allow our Fire command staff to communicate more easily with our mutual aid partners when we go to another city or have other fire departments come here to help battle large scale fires and other emergencies.

My hope is for a safe and enjoyable holiday weekend for everybody.  A good chance to recharge the “batteries” and get back at it next week.

Yesterday morning we received a call for assistance with a car that had crashed into a townhome. As you can see by the picture, the car made it all the way into the living quarters of this dwelling.

The resident of the townhome was sitting on the couch and was thrown about 15 feet across his livingroom and into the hallway. Luckily there were no major injuries to the resident or the driver of the vehicle. I don’t have the exact cause of the accident, but obviously there was a series of events that landed the driver in this situation.

Before I joined the fire department I had never really thought about this type of accident, and while rare, it does happen from time to time in our city and surrounding cities. In fact last Friday in Chanhassen a person accidentally drove their car into a hair salon. In that case there were nine injuries of varying degrees.

Site preparation is underway for station four.  The picture below shows the large auger drilling holes for geo piers.  

 A few details about geo piers.  There will be 80 piers installed on the portion of the site where the building sits in order to stabilize the soils.  Each pier is 30″ iin diameter and ranges from 11 to 18 feet in depth.  When the piers are filled and compacted with crushed limestone they each hold 4-5 tons of material. 

 Despite the constant rain over the past few days, we remain on schedule at this early juncture.