Dear Friends and Neighbors,
Since Thanksgiving I’ve had difficulty writing, not only this column but anything else. At first I thought it was just my transition from worker to self-employed. But as the days passed, I realized my muteness was caused by a sense of being uncovered.
To be “covered” can mean a lot of things. We use the word to describe everything from having insurance or a financial backer to having a roof over our heads or a tarp on the car. Protection from the elements, whether natural or man-made, is the usual implication. To be uncovered, then, is the removal of some layer of protection we consider normal, expected.
The fire in Lindsay two days after Thanksgiving which destroyed the century-old brick building that once housed Stamper Motors left me feeling that we, as a community, have become uncovered. The transition to our current state, in which the city’s fire protection is supplied by the police department, began many years ago when the police and fire departments were merged into one department of public safety under the leadership of Rich Wilkinson and Scot Townsend. Despite protests by fire protection professionals and a grand jury investigation, that merger led eventually to the cross-training of policemen for fire work and the loss of professional firemen.
Although there have been other examples of problems created by this double-duty arrangement, November’s fire was the handwriting on the wall. According to one eyewitness, only two officers were on duty when the fire was called in. It takes two people to man a fire truck, so both were employed fighting the fire and no one was available to direct the traffic that naturally began accumulating at the scene. By the time two more officers responded to man the ladder truck (almost an hour after the fire started,) the streets were clogged with cars. It took twenty minutes for the ladder truck to reach the fire two blocks from the station. By that time the flames had stopped licking the skies behind Webb-Sanders Funeral Home, but the fire burned for hours, filling the streets downtown and lungs of every resident within a quarter mile with black smoke that lingered for days.
I can hear their protests now: this is the best we can do in a small town with an impoverished population, shrinking tax base, increasing absentee ownership, whatever other definitions of handicap that have become normal to many rural communities across the nation. When people hear the name “Lindsay,” they no longer think of it as the center of Tulare County’s orange production or remember it as “a nice town, a great olive.” They think of it as a farmworker town where people are regularly made hungry and thirsty by freezes and droughts. We’re a town that regularly needs some kind of bailout by the government at one level or another, and the City’s become expert at raising the cry.
But this dearth in fire coverage is the City’s own making. I don’t think it’s the best we can do. There’s some uncovering needed down at City Hall, and I hope the newly-elected City Council will address this question in the New Year. In the meantime, everyone be really careful with those Christmas tree lights and New Year’s Eve fireworks lest we discover the hard way just how uncovered we really are.
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Trudy Wischemann is a volunteer fireman’s daughter
who remembers the death of her friend Kevin Suttles in the Brown's Point Cliff House fire in
the second grade. You can send her your
suggestions for improvements in Lindsay’s fire protection c/o P.O. Box 1374,
Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
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