IONIA, N.Y. — On July 28th, 2015, Ionia volunteer firefighters were woken in the middle of the night to an alert of a fire in their own building. It was a total loss. Now, after nearly three years of rebuilding, they’re backing their fire trucks into their new home for the first time.
“It’s a pretty exciting day here for us. We’ve waited a long time, it’s been a lot of hard negotiations with the insurance company to get a settlement for the building and to get something as nice as what we’ve got. We never expected to end up with something this nice here in this little community,” said Lynn Parrish, Ionia Fire Chief.
It took several years of negotiations with the insurance company in the amount of a million dollars — along with donations from the community, other organizations and fire departments and fundraisers — to build the new facility.
“It was really devastating for our community and our department to try and survive and have a sense of purpose without having our trucks in town. They were housed in other communities outside of this little hamlet so it was really nice to get our trucks back home,” added Parrish.
Dan Broadwell is the oldest active volunteer firefighter serving the hamlet of Ionia for 63 years. He was a part of building the old station back in 1955.
“It is something, a building that I, I get misty. I can’t believe we ended up with a building this beautiful and so adequate. For the next 100 years this building will service this community,” said Dan Broadwell, Volunteer Firefighter.
The same American flag that was hanging outside of the old station is now hanging outside of the new building.
“We thought it would be special for us to take that down and we had another flag flying up until the time of demolition last September, so we kept the old flag with the intention of putting it back up the day we moved into the new station,” added Parrish.
There are 25 active members of the fire department. They will be having a ribbon cutting ceremony on the three year anniversary of the fire, July 28th.