“Without the Fire Service, There Is No Civil Defense”

Without the Fire Service, There Is No Civil Defense

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The Editor’s Opinion Page

The fight to retain the United States Fire Administration has received the support of the Joint Council of National Fire Service Organizations and the Metropolitan Committee of the IAFC.

The metro chiefs in a resolution passed at their conference in San Diego last month called for the appropriation of $8.5 million for the USFA in the fiscal year ’83 budget. The support of these two organizations is a welcome addition to the ranks of those seeking to save the USFA.

In an editorial last February, we detailed the many services that the Fire Administration has provided to help local fire departments reduce the fire deaths and property losses in this nation. However, the Reagan administration obviously regards even the pittances doled out to the USFA over the years as not only excessive, but as useless.

In the upcoming budget, the President has requested $252.3 million for civil defense. Now, we are all for civil defense. We also vigorously declare that without the fire service, there can be no effective civil defense.

We will say without any hesitancy that if you ask a state civil defense director how he was able to handle a major emergency, he will reply that he could not have resolved the problem without the fire and police services. These two services are the vital ingredients of any civil defense recipe.

Without the fire and police services, there is no civil defense program worth more than the paper it’s written on. How better can the federal government involve the fire service in civil defense than through the U.S. Fire Administration?

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