The fire departments that were close enough to respond to the Silver City area were at Lawrence Creek, Mannford, Oilton, and Olive, five to nine miles away in various directions. As much as our little community appreciated the services of these departments, it had become apparent that they were too far away to insure acceptable response times, especially since they all had their own problems to deal with closer to home.

For example, this is exactly what the horizon to the west looked like one evening in March 1996, except it was several miles across:

We LOVE these guys and gals from the other area fire departments, and quite frankly, were it not for their helping us to get our training organized and their donations of equipment and gear, we would not have become operational as soon as we did.

The way we see it, we're all going to be out there on the same incident sooner or later (probably sooner), and the more the merrier. In fact, more than half of our fire runs to date have been to provide mutual aid to these folks, and a significant percentage of the remainder involves them providing mutual aid to us. We salute you.