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The Boone County Fire District is the third largest fire service organization in Missouri. |
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The Fire District protects 532 square miles of residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural property. This is the largest fire protection service area in the state. |
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The Fire District's roots were first established in 1964 in an abandoned chicken house on Rt. PP (Clark Lane) in Columbia. |
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The Fire District's annual budget is approximately $3.9 million. |
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To totally staff the Fire District with career staffing, the additional cost to the taxpayers is estimated at $15 million. |
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In recent years, the Fire District has obtained in excess of $6.5 million in grant funds. |
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The Fire District operates a regional hazardous materials team and serves as the base for the central Missouri fire incident management team for large-scale emergency events. (There are three incident management teams, one each based in St. Louis County and Jackson County and the third in Boone County.) |
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The Fire District responded to 3,885 requests for emergency services in 2005. (67% Medical Calls, 10% Fire Calls, 3% Hazardous Condition, 5% Service Calls, 5% Good Intent Calls, 6% False Calls, 2% other) |
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Approximately 67% of emergency activities are emergency medical responses. |
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The Fire District operates with a volunteer staff of approximately 400 personnel who annually give over 117,000 hours of volunteer service to the organization. The volunteer staff is supported by a career staff that provides training, maintenance, public safety education and administrative services. |
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The Fire District is the largest volunteer fire department in Missouri. |
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Volunteer firefighters come from all walks of life. They include professors, business owners, students, farmers, nurses, contractors, physicians and law enforcement officers. |
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The Fire District operates 14 fire stations and some 120 emergency vehicles. |
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Volunteer firefighters currently reside in Fire District stations facilitating a more rapid response of emergency equipment. |
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The cost to totally outfit a firefighter is $5,449. |
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Fire District fire stations are designed in a modular fashion so that when expansion is warranted and funding is available, additional building modules can be added at lesser costs. |
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The Fire District Headquarters (valued at $3 million) was purchased for $1.8 million. Rental income offsets 75% of the building's operating expenses. |
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The Fire District responds to large wildland fires in Missouri under a cooperative agreement with the Missouri Department of Conservation. Boone County is the only fire department in the state that deploys a wildland certified firefighting team to the western United States to fight large forest fires for the U.S. Forest Service. |
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Fire District Command Staff are actively involved in far reaching national and international emergency service programs, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, International Association of Fire Chiefs, National Fire Academy, National Association for Search & Rescue and the International Fire Service Training Association. Several serve on FEMA disaster management teams. |
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Over the years, 14 Fire District members have become Fire Chiefs in other communities. |
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The Fire District is known nationally for its many innovations. Among those are volunteer firefighter recruitment, retention and residency program; contextually formatted training; public safety education, having received the 1996 International Association of Fire Chiefs Championship Award for Excellence for its Survival Kids Program and its unique use of the Incident Management System. |
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The Fire District is designated by FEMA as one of only 28 Federal Urban Search and Rescue Task Forces in the nation. The designation is the result of some 100,000 volunteer hours given by 210 personnel from within and outside the Fire District. As a federal resource, Missouri Task Force 1 is on call for federal disaster response and, upon activation, must be on military aircraft within six hours with 70 personnel, four search canines and 100,000 lbs. of equipment. Missouri Task Force 1 was deployed to the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001 and most recently to Hurricane Katrina on August 27, 2005. |
