St. Joseph, MO, Fire Department Receives Grant Funding for Equipment Upgrades

Oct. 21—The St. Joseph Fire Department recently received over $100,000 in grant funding to upgrade aging equipment of fire trucks and implement a mobile inspection software.

$13,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funding was awarded to the general fund fire department program, and $18,871 from Tyler Technologies was used to purchase digital fire inspection and preplan software.

"The new inspection software is much more efficient and will allow us to move our paper driven inspections to digital inspections via an iPad in the field," said Jamey McVicker, assistant fire chief with the SJFD. "Now we'll be able to retrieve historical data instead of having to pull that from a file cabinet the way we're doing it now."

Following the installation of the inspection software, a pre-incident planning software will also be fully implemented into the trucks, allowing fire crews to have a general emergency operation plan in place prior to arriving at a scene.

In addition, the department received $79,000 from the Pipeline Emergency Response Grant program which includes the purchase of 14 gas monitors to be placed on fire apparatuses.

"We're going to use it to replace all the 4-gas meters on all of our apparatus which are aging," said Kurt Fuehrer, chief training officer with the SJFD. "These detect CO, levels of explosions and anything in the air that could be flammable, so they're very essential. Especially this time of year when people start firing up their furnaces and think they might need a CO check; we'll take these in and tell them if they're home is safe or not."

The St. Joseph Fire Department has received several grants this past year that is putting them on track to have all their equipment updated within the required time frame.

"Everything is coming along the way it should," said Fuehrer. "The PERG grant in particular was very helpful because it was 100% funded, there was no city match involved with this and we're one of the first departments in Missouri to get it."

The St. Joseph Fire Department expects to have the new equipment and software implemented by January 2025.

Jenna Wilson can be reached at [email protected].

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