(NYP)
Bound Brook, NJ, experienced a devastating fire and facts are once again ignored concerning a primary community function: fire protection.
If there had been a serious crime event, perhaps a mass shooting, there would surely be details about the police response including the number of officers and their response times to the scene.
The article is totally silent about either the presence or performance of the fire department.
Fire grows exponentially over time, a very short time.
According to the National Fire Protection Association, if the fire department cannot be on scene and operating within about eight minutes at the most, the fire will expand beyond the room of origin to engulf the entire building and others adjacent.
That’s exactly what happened in Bound Brook.
An adequate response could have contained the huge fire to the building of origin.
Bound Brook is an entirely volunteer fire brigade without the ability to provide reasonably assured response times and firefighter staffing.
Bound Brook has, of course, a paid police department and in a bit of community irony, their headquarters once burned to the ground because the fire department wasn’t.
It’s an ongoing costly and illogical fact that many communities blithely ignore the need for basic professional fire (and EMS) services; many of them rue their lack of foresight the day after a fire like the one in Bound Brook.
New Jersey is not alone — virtually all of Long Island, N.Y., a heavily urban area, is an entirely volunteer fire operation due to the cushy and shadowy political relationships which encourage questionable decisions and policy making.