After escorting his daughter to Allegheny College to begin her freshman year, James Gallagher made a stop in downtown Meadville before heading back to his California home.
“He saw there was a firehouse here and so he came over and asked if there was anything they needed money for,” Gallagher’s daughter, Jessie, said Thursday afternoon.
That’s exactly the way Chief Larndo (Tunie) Hedrick of Meadville Central Fire Department remembers Gallagher’s August 2007 visit. “When he asked if there was anything we needed funds for, I told him we needed another camera to replace one that’s 12 years old — and that we needed to upgrade our heavy vehicle rescue bags.”
Gallagher, who works in Fireman’s Fund Insurance Co.’s San Marin, Calif., office, took it from there.
Thursday afternoon, Jessie made a stop at the Park Avenue fire station herself, presenting a ceremonial check in the amount of $17,800 to the department on behalf of the Fireman’s Fund Heritage program. Executive Service Consultant Thaddeus Pajak and Senior Loss Control Consultant Mark Barch from the company’s Pittsburgh office were also on hand for the ceremony.
A delighted Hedrick, who accepted the check on behalf of his department, will soon be shopping for the department’s new thermal imaging camera and rescue bags. “The camera is used inside the structure when firefighters can’t see,” he explained. “The camera detects heat or coldness, so if you’re looking at a wall, you don’t have to breech the wall to determine if there’s fire behind it,” he said. “You can use the camera to see through stuff.” The bags, he added, can be stacked together and inflated to free victims from everything from wrecked vehicles to collapsed structures.
When he filed the grant application on behalf of Meadville’s firefighters, Gallagher was participating in a corporate tradition dating back to the company’s founding in 1863.
The company takes its name from an early practice of paying 10 percent of its profits to widows and orphans of firefighters. Today, Pajak explained, “it’s a philanthropic endeavor of Fireman’s Fund that we pay a certain percentage of our profits to the Heritage program. Through an elaborate process, funds are awarded in the form of grants.”
Every Fireman’s Fund employee is able to nominate a fire department for a grant. Four times each year, according to Pajak, a new committee of fire chiefs is formed to review all grant applications and decide which requests should be funded with the available pool of money.
“Most of the firehouses out where we live have received grants,” Jessie said “He thought it would be nice to get one out here, so he wrote it.”
Jessie helped, responding to her father’s requests for information about things like the age of Allegheny’s buildings, what kind of fire alarm system they have and what the fire procedures are.
The first attempt was rejected, Hedrick recalled, but Gallagher didn’t give up. “We e-mailed back and forth and he said he had some new ideas for the application, so he re-applied.”
It worked. “One day I got a phone call and he said, ‘Guess what? Not only did you get approved — you got both items. Usually, you just get one,’ ” Hedrick said with a grin.
“It’s critically important that the Meadville firefighters have the proper tools and equipment needed to perform rescues in any situation,” Gallagher wrote in a prepared statement. “I was glad to get the support of people in the local Fireman’s Fund office as well as people in the Meadville community to help make the case for this grant. I’m hoping it will make a difference and ultimately help save lives.”
Mary Spicer can be reached at 724-6370 or by e-mail at mspicer@meadvilletribune.com.
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