Postwar Building Boom: 1945 - 1957

At war’s end, the Bower Hill community would change drastically and rapidly from a small mining and mill town surrounded by farmland into a residential suburb. The population increased tenfold, and with it, the demands on the department. According to anecdotes from this time, construction site fires and accidents were common. However, because the majority of the structures now in the area were new, fires in occupied structures were rare. By now, the entire area was covered by a public water supply, and almost no structure in the township was more than 1000 feet from a fire hydrant.

The community now had a new need: Ambulance service. Prior to the war, Mercy Hospital of Pittsburgh and a few other hospitals had provided this service, but these had been discontinued because of personnel and materiel shortages during the war. The Scott Township Police Department was providing limited ambulance service, and Glendale Hose Company No. 1 (formerly Glendale Volunteer Fire Department, renamed in the 1930s) began providing ambulance service to the township, but call volumes often outstripped the ambulance’s availability. In 1954, Bower Hill began to provide ambulance service with a 1948 GMC Panel Truck donated by the Pennsylvania Boys Reform School in South Fayette Township. Ambulance calls soon exceeded fire calls by nearly a 2:1 margin.

The advent of almost universal automobile ownership brought about another problem relatively new to the area: automobile accidents. Bower Hill Road was widened to four lanes to accommodate higher speeds, and nearly all roads in the community were paved with asphalt. With more cars going faster, more accidents resulted in the entrapment of the occupants. The department bought a used Jeep CJ2A for conversion into a mobile power plant and light rescue vehicle. The conversion was done entirely by members of the department.

Of course, these new apparatus purchases would have been impossible if the department had remained in its single-garage building on Montgomery Avenue. In 1953, Bower Hill Fire Department swapped its property on Montgomery Avenue for an abandoned strip mine site at 161 Vanadium Road. A new two-bay concrete block building made housing more than one piece of equipment possible for the first time, and its location was now a little closer to the center of the department’s service area. The Ladies Auxiliary made the down payment of $3,500.00 for the new building.