2 weeks Ago
FORT MILL — This town's firefighters have hurried on a cold December day to stop a blaze from devastating a historic church. Once, they hustled to the town's nature preserve area to find an overturned train. But they'll be there for the routine traffic crashes or fire alarms, too.
And a $4.2 million federal grant will add more to the crews. Fort Mill is hiring 15 new firefighters next year, Fire Chief Chipper Wilkerson said.
That will give the Fort Mill Fire Department 57 full-time personnel, plus four part-time staff. And they're needed in one of South Carolina's fastest-growing municipalities. "I remember when I first got here (in 2014), you could go up (S.
C. Highway) 160 to Tega Cay and there was very little between the interstate and past Baxter," Wilkerson said. "And now it's developed fairly well.
Same thing with the town. There's been a number of annexations and growth opportunities." York County is a top spot for people moving to SC.
Will the roads be ready? The Federal Emergency Management Agency awarded the town a $4.2 million Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response (SAFER) Grant to cover salaries for the next three years, beginning in March. It's been 30 years since Fort Mill began staffing its fire department with paid firefighters.
As growth has had an impact both in town limits and the incorporated area, the town has sought FEMA money in the past. It won a SAFER grant in 2015 and hired nine firefighters, Wilkerson said. The fire department is responsible for all calls within town limits, and contracts with York County for eight square miles of unincorporated area, he said.
The town's third fire station will be built in the area of the Masons Bend subdivision in the southwest part of Fort Mill. The Town Council is expected to approve building the station, which could be ready by late 2026, Wilkerson said. Fort Mill parents asked to delay opening 2 new schools.
Trustees voted to stay on schedule instead. Unity Presbyterian Church, a congregation that formed in Fort Mill just a few years after the nation's founding, credits the firefighters with saving some of its structures after an electric short caused a fire in December 2018. "Though Unity Hall and its two-story educational structure would not survive, rapid response and heroic work through the night by the Fort Mill Fire Department saved the adjacent Fellowship Hall and, miraculously, the historic sanctuary," according to the church's website.
That same year, 16 boxcars from a Norfolk Southern train derailed off the tracks through the Anne Springs Close Greenway. No injuries and significant damages at the greenway were reported. That's an out-of-the-ordinary call for the fire department, but the chief said the routine ones can be plenty strenuous.
"The things that challenge us are the day-to-day traffic accidents during peak traffic times," Wilkerson said. "You have something on the interstate, and then all the traffic tries to divert and comes through town and just find every which way they can. It's another key reason to get our stations better distributed throughout the town and keep adding those in the future.
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