Being the Fire Chief of Cove Acres Volunteer Fire Department has been one of the highlights of my life. It was a very stressful but be so very rewarding to be able to provide quality care and service to the community and Comanche County.
In 2004 I moved to the Elgin/Fletcher area and was eager to join the local Volunteer Fire Department and so I joined Cove Acres Volunteer Fire Department in May of 2004. One thing I learned quickly was that our equipment was far from adequate. In the station there were 5 fire trucks, and only one of them worked. When I say worked, that does not imply that they were in any way effective, they just happened to roll down the road and pump water out of a hose.
On August 8th of 2004, Chief Dryl Burruss, resigned and an election was held. Only one person stood up to volunteer as the Chief and that was me. So I gladly accepted the task of being in charge of an organization that I knew very little about and a trade I knew even less about. As my first task I set out to get the trucks in service and to become fire truck worthy. It's one thing to have a fire truck, but to have a fire truck that can perform the task needed while doing so safely. We had 5 trucks as I stated before.
We only had 7 firefighters on the department and so it was difficult to get very much done manpower wise. The first few months I relied a lot on Dave Herring as he was one of the hardest working guys I have ever come across in my life. Dave would help out whenever you asked, even in the middle of the night. We worked many of late nights getting the trucks back up and making them safe. Manpower wasn't the only hardship, the department was under a financial hardship as well. With the department not having funds to upkeep or to even pay for fuel in the trucks, a lot of the time I had to pay for the cost of items out of my personal budget. Over the entire time I was Chief, I spent well over $7,000 in personal funds in order to to get the department back on it's feet and to maintain operations.
It wasn't long after I took over a Chief that 2 more people joined that really helped out. Daniel Reeves and CJ Douglas were very eager to help and continue to support the department. We started working on the trucks and and the equipment to get them running. We finally got Brush 2 running, and it was a beast with 550 gallons and a 21HP motor!