The Chattanooga Fire Department will be celebrating 150 years of service to their community this month.
The department was made up of over 100 all-volunteer citizens when it started in 1871 after a downtown fire destroyed many structures. Soon after the fire, a petition was started to form the fire department, which remained all-volunteer through the middle 1880s.
Over the decades the department has evolved through technology changes from bucket brigades and hand trucks to horse-drawn apparatus to million-dollar aerial devices.
The Chattanooga Fire Department has come a long way since those days and is now comprised of over 400 personnel that staff 26 companies out of 20 firehouses. The department serves 185,000 citizens across 143 square miles.
