NEWBURGH – Newburgh’s old 21-foot fire boat has served the city well, but it’s time for a trade-in, on a new and bigger craft. The issue for the city is the price tag, $370,000, an amount the city cannot easily afford on its own.
FEMA will cover $248,700 of that through a SAFER grant (Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response).
“This is exactly the type of thing that the SAFER grant program is designed to support and Newburgh is exactly the kind of community that deserves this support,” Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney said, in announcing the funding, with city officials, on the Newburgh Waterfront Thursday morning.
Fire Chief Michael Vatter welcomed the news.
“It’s not just the oil trains; it’s everything else that the trains carry,” Vatter noted. “We’re a couple of hundred feet from the water’s edge to the railroad tracks. Our smaller boat couldn’t put booms in place. This can drag booms.”
Vatter thanks Maloney for help in finding the money. Inset shows the new boat which will replace the
old one, docked in the upper right of the photo
Maloney said that the new 28-foot boat, with several high-tech features including a powerful pump and water cannon, will be a critical safety asset for a wide stretch of the Hudson River that sees a lot of recreational and commercial traffic.
“So it’s not just about the City of Newburgh, it’s about all the communities up and down both sides of the river that may need this type of capacity in an emergency,” Maloney said. “If there is a warehouse fire in Poughkeepsie, if there is an oil train disaster, God forbid, in one of the communities here.”
Maloney said he has been told that Newburgh’s new boat will be the “… best piece of fire equipment on the river from Albany to New York City.”
