Canosia Township
Fire Department Awarded

$104,040 FEMA Grant
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Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) approved Canosia Volunteer Fire Department’s grant application submitted under FEMA’s FY 02 Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program for Fire Operations and Firefighter Safety. The approved project costs amounts to $115, 600. The Federal government share is 90 percent ($104,040) of the approved amount and Canosia’s share is $11,560.
 

The grant application outlined the following reason for our township to obtain assistance:
 

Canosia has some large facilities such as the St. Louis County-State of Minnesota Highway Maintenance facility, Pike Lake Elementary school, a large grocery store, some large storage facilities, churches, communication buildings, a reclamation site, health care providers and other businesses associated with a rural-urban community. Canosia is also located close enough to the Superior National Forest and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area to be called for fire protection assistance.
 

The department requested assistance from the program for the purchase of new self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA), a cascade system, and a compressor for refilling extra air bottles for each SCBA. The compressor would allow the filling of air packs as well as supplying breathing air for neighboring fire departments. Canosia belongs to the Lakehead Mutual Aid Association which presently has 29 volunteer fire departments. Canosia is centrally located in the mutual aid area so gets called to many mutual aid calls for structure fires, tanker incidents on the highways and aircraft crashes for many of the volunteer fire departments. Last year Canosia responded to the Duluth Federal Prison to providing mutual aid to Hermantown Fire Department.
 

Canosia contains part of the Duluth International Airport, which serves Northwest Airlines, Cirrus Aircraft Manufacturing Company, the Northwest Airlines Airbus Maintenance Facility and the 148th Minnesota Air National Guard Base. The department has responded to crashes involving Air National Guard fighter jets, test planes for Cirrus Design and Manufacturing and other private party plane crashes. It is critical that each fire fighter and first responder have breathing apparatus to respond to these incidents which may have hazardous materials or be an incident involving national security. Presently the department does not have enough individual breathing apparatus to respond to these incidents. In addition, purchase of fitted face masks for each responder to meet NFPA recommendations are included.
 

Canosia is located on a major highway leading from Wisconsin and Minnesota to Canada. Many tanker and other types of trucks hauling unknown products are using this roadway. The department has responded to tanker roll-overs involving hazardous materials when all responding personal had to wear air packs for evacuation and recovery.
 

Funds will provide turnout gear for each firefighter. The department has purchased six sets of gear in 2001. The grant will provide an additional 14 sets of turn out gear to completely replacing the existing 20 year old sets. Finally, a thermal-imaging camera will be purchased for search and rescue and for checking hot spots in a fire mop-up operation.

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