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An
Aging
Community: 1992
- 1999
By the
1990s,
the face of
the community was changing in another way. It was aging. Most of the
residential development in Bower Hill happened between 1947 and 1960.
The
people who bought those houses had raised their children there, but now
those
children were going off to start families and find housing of their
own. And
the people who occupied the housing in Bower Hill had no intention of
leaving;
they were (and still are) quite happy to live in a safe, convenient,
comfortable neighborhood with good services and reasonable taxes. Young
people
had to look elsewhere for homes. This had two obvious effects on the
fire
department. First, firefighting is mostly an occupation for the young.
When the
community doesn’t include many young people, volunteer firefighters are
hard to
come by.
Second, the elderly require more emergency services than the young.
Ambulance
call volumes continued to grow every year, until it became obvious that
they
would soon exceed the capabilities of the decreasing trained volunteer
pool.
Bower Hill
wasn’t the only
local department to face this problem; it was common throughout the
South Hills
of Allegheny County. Departments began to pool resources and
enter into joint operations to
continue to give the level of service the residents needed. Bower Hill
joined
forces with Glendale Hose Company No. 1 and incorporated Scott Township
EMS
(STEMS), owned equally by the two departments, and hired full time and
part
time EMTs and Paramedics to provide 24
hour-a-day
ALS coverage. Each department provided an ambulance to STEMS and
the
durable medical equipment to stock it. Bower Hill provided its latest
ambulance, a 1994 Ford “Type III” ambulance with a KJT Sentinel
ambulance module. Members of the Bower
Hill and Glendale departments were given first
consideration for jobs
as the initial employees, though application was open to anyone with
the
requisite certification.
The
staffing
problem was
somewhat less acute with firefighting. While there were fewer young
adults in
the department, the overall membership was stable, and since the fire
call
volume remained low, it was adequate to the task. Equipment still
needed to be
replaced, and when it was, it was replaced with something more
efficient and
capable. The 1969 pumper, which had been
extensively
rebuilt in 1981, was replaced in 1992 with a new Sutphen
Custom pumper of 1500 GPM capacity, and
the 1973
mini-pumper and rescue, which had also been
heavily
modified in 1985, was sold at the same time. In 1995, the department
added a
utility and squad vehicle, an unmodified Chevrolet 4-wheel drive
crew-cab pickup
truck, which
proved invaluable for many purposes. With this latest addition, the
entire
Bower Hill fleet was now diesel-powered and equipped with automatic
transmissions. Firefighters’ protective gear was replaced as needed,
and new PBI Aramid coats replaced the
older Nomex/Kevlar models.
Allegheny
County
finally adopted 911 as the
universal
emergency phone number in the
1990s, and a new fire radio system followed. The old VHF Low Band
Frequency of
33.76MHz was frequently jammed by electronic interference from neon
lights and
atmospheric
“skip” signals, and was replaced with a new UHF system which
incorporated
dispatch and fireground radio channels. The dispatch center continued
at the Scott Township Police Department, but was now operated as
"Southwest Regional Dispatch." This operation would later be moved to
the Allegheny County Communications Center in Pittsburgh, where the
Southwest Desk was the first to begin operations. A
new
county-wide numbering system for all fire stations was adopted.
Stations were
numbered alphabetically by municipality, beginning with Station 101
(Aleppo Township). Bower Hill became Station 255. The old number “4”
was soon removed from all apparatus and replaced with the new “255”
designation. Helmet shields soon followed. Older coats remained
unchanged, but new replacements all sported the new number.
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