Buncombe Fire Chief Jason Grant doesn’t like relying on other departments to help him protect his tiny town, but he has no other choice.
He and 10 other trained volunteers are responsible for covering 26 square miles of sparsely populated rural Southern Illinois, to the north and west of Vienna.
By day, his guys work other jobs, many far away from Buncombe. And Grant knows that he’ll be lucky to get two or three firefighters on the truck, if an emergency call comes at the wrong time. “The only thing that keeps us going is community departments,” he said. Those units come from across Johnson County to lend resources and manpower when it’s needed.
“It’s hard to be a non-paid department and get anybody that wants to participate,” Grant said. “Then, if we do get people, we don’t have the proper equipment to give them for them to be safe.”