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De Luz VFD receives Community Projects funding

The De Luz Volunteer Fire Department will be receiving $5,800 of District Five Community Projects funds.

A 5-0 San Diego County Board of Supervisors vote September 27 approved the money for 24 new storage lockers at the Cathy Drive fire station and a 50-gallon capacity ice machine which will serve the ice chests which store beverages on engines for firefighter consumption.

“Just happy to hear about it,” said Mike Manchor, the fire chief of the De Luz Volunteer Fire Department.

The fire department has had the station for two years. “It’s not new. It’s an old building,” Manchor said. “It’s been retrofitted, or refurbished.”

The building was built in 1968 and had been a garage for the De Luz Heights Municipal Water District. That district merged with the Fallbrook Public Utility District in 1990 and the facility became an FPUD garage. It had been an avocado packing house before being acquired by the volunteer fire department. The facility currently has four bunks for overnight staffing.

The volunteer firefighters will store personal protective equipment in the new lockers. The firefighters currently store that equipment in their cars, so the lockers will make the equipment more accessible when it is needed.

The ice machine will be used for strike teams on deployment. Drinks are stored in ice chests in order to prevent firefighters from becoming dehydrated. “Each one needs a ten-pound bag of ice, and we don’t have storage capacity to store ten-pound bags of ice, so we need a machine,” Manchor said.

The supervisors’ action authorizes the county’s Chief Financial Officer to execute a grant agreement establishing terms for receipt of the Community Projects funds.

 

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