MEADOWOOD FIRE TRAINING CENTER
The Meadowood County Area Fire Department was founded in 1953 in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, by Donald Holbrook, a Boston financier with a lifelong interest in the fire service and in advancing fire safety and firefighting effectiveness. A private nonprofit corporation with more than 50 active volunteer firefighters/EMTs, Meadowood provides mutual-aid assistance to the communities in Cheshire County and the surrounding areas in southwestern New Hampshire, southeastern Vermont, and north-central Massachusetts, offers to rural communities the use of specialized equipment generally not available to them; provides facilities and training programs for firefighters and EMS/rescuc personnel; and had operated a fire research bureau for the purpose of improving and advancing the fire service.
Meadowood is a member of the Southwestern New Hampshire District Fire Mutual Aid system and works through its dispatch center (see Fire Fngineering, November 1990). The department is on the running cards for firstor secondalarm responses for many of the surrounding towns.
The philosophy behind Meadowood brought many firsts to the region, including a large-capacity tanker, the first aerial ladder outside the city of Keene, the first largediameter hose reel/pumper in the area, and one of the first fire/rescue units. Today, Meadowood has a large tanker; a hose reel/pumper with more than 6,200 feet of four-inch hose and a 1,250-gpm pump; a MackBaker 75-foot tower ladder; and a rescue unit equipped with an 18cylinder cascade system, a 15-kw PTO generator, lights (fixed and portable), air tools, air bags, hydraulic rescue tools, and numerous hand tools, ropes, and more. Department members design and construct much of the equipment.
Each year two large weekend fire and rescue schools are held. Each school enrolls about 600 students daily from the New England states and beyond. In addition, numerous specialized courses—from SCBA to ICS and haz-mat response trainingare conducted throughout the year. All courses are either from the National Fire Protection Association 1001 curriculum and certified for credit through the New Hampshire Fire Standards & Training Commission or are specialty courses in fire and rescue subjects. Over the years, many of the specialty courses have found their way into the New Hampshire certification curriculum.
The Fire Research Bureau was extremely active during Chief Holbrook’s tenure. With his passing, however, this aspect of Meadowood’s mission has passed into history. The development of the Southwestem New Hampshire Fire Mutual Aid system and dispatch center (serving more than 60 communities) is in large part the result of the efforts of Chief Holbrook and the Meadowood Research Bureau.
