The New Market District Volunteer Fire Company has a long history of evolving its apparatus to meet its current and future service delivery needs of its community, starting in 1964 under the leadership of Fire Chief James Hahn the company started responding to the needs of the community with a second engine, then a 1964 International Howe was placed in service known as Engine-152, through the years with growing apparatus size, the opening of the Green Valley Station and a lack of expansion in the firehouse Engine Bay pushed the company to drop back to a single engine and a tanker under the leadership of Fire Chief Jerry Shanks in the early 1990s, which would then lead us to a period where we moved into the arena of combination apparatus housing an Engine-Tanker and Rescue-Engine which were both procured via Frederick County Government prior to the end of Fire Chief Jerry Shanks tenure as Fire Chief. In taking office in 2012, Fire Chief Nalborczyk realized very quickly that with a growing call volume, tightening streets and neighborhoods and a rapid growth in development and the municipal water supply system that the day of combination apparatus in our department had sunset and devised a plan to take the department back to mission critical single purpose apparatus, doing this once again dropped us back to a single engine in the end of 2016. Much planning and financial responsibility led us to take on a project to add a 54'x60' Auxiliary Apparatus Building on our property in calendar year 2018, with this building and a notice in the growth in call volume and volunteer membership and participation, Fire Chief Nalborczyk presented a plan to the Board of Directors in the spring of 2019 to reintroduce second engine service to the department and ultimately to the community. The Board of Directors approved this notion and set the Apparatus Committee to work looking into the best fit, be it either a new, demo or used piece of apparatus, after several months, countless searches and much homework it was decided that a used piece of apparatus would be the most fiscal responsible and appropriate piece to acquire. The Apparatus Committee spent weekends going and seeing and going over apparatus until a Sunday evening when the committee felt down on their luck finding the appropriate piece we stopped in the Town of Conestoga, Pennsylvania where we would ultimately find the unit which is set to become Engine-153 in the middle of September this year, Conestoga VFC of Lancaster County, PA was selling a 1990 Simon-Duplex/E-ONE pumper with a 1000 gallon water tank, 1500GPM Pump, 6 man cab, short wheelbase pumper that they had recently retired which was in amazing condition with very low hours and miles. The committee was afforded a couple hours to perform an inspection of the apparatus and to review records pertaining to the apparatus and decided to carry that information back to the other members of the committee, who decided in very short order that unit would be the one. The Apparatus Committee is plugging away at the steps to get this unit ready for service, the unit has currently passed Maryland Safety Inspection is tagged and titled to our department, initial operator orientation and training was started while the unit awaited its next step which was to be delivered to Adkins Automotive of Washington County, MD where the unit will undergo a paint job and a few additions/modifications to get the unit exactly how preferred by the Apparatus Committee to serve our community. This apparatus will also bring a new responsibility of serving as a Foam Unit as it has a significant Class-B AR-AFFF Foam Cell and internal Foam Proportioning system on the unit, our Training Division has begun to reach out to MFRI to have Foam based training to refresh and dial in our skills with Foam firefighting.

We the New Market District Volunteer Fire Company would be remised if we didn't give Thanks to those that are due, first and foremost being the community we serve without your donations and support at our fundraisers a project like this would not be possible, the Town of New Market for their ongoing support in the Auxiliary Building Project and the Frederick County Volunteer Fire and Rescue Association Planning and Research and Executive Committee for their unwavering support of us restoring our Second Engine service.

More photos and updates to come as the project moves forward.