AFD Engines 3 & 4, Rescue 1 on scene Amherst College Dakin House for training
Besides paying the town $120,000 for ambulance and fire protection services this past year, Amherst College also allows AFD to train at the abandoned Dakin House next to the College owned Amherst Golf Course.
Since the Student Call Force has a few new members and the UMass campus is pretty busy today with students moving in, AFD decided to use the Dakin House for hands on training: Pulling hose lines and practicing rescues (using full turn out gear/air tanks) inside the once ornate house.
Structure to left was off limits to training because it's in such bad shape
No, unfortunately they did not actually torch the two story house.
Although someday soon Amherst College will have to raze all the structures as they are increasingly becoming a safety hazard, even though our assessor still values the property at $677,200.
In 2015 AFD had its busiest year ever with Amherst College accounting for 4% of their total calls.
I remember when AFD confused Lincoln Apartments with University Apartments (the latter abandoned and where they should have been -- instead of terrifying a bunch of grad students (and their children) from China who feared that the authorities had arrived to drag them off to the Gulag.
ReplyDeleteAnd instead of calling the relevant UMass administrator and saying "we f***ed up, this is what happened, and we're sorry." -- or maybe even adding "can we do something to try to 'make this right', perhaps bring some equipment over sometime and put on a demonstration -- we have kids too, we didn't know anyone was living there..."
Instead of that, they tried to pretend it hadn't happened.
Unfortunately, I'd seen the fire truck out my bathroom window...