DEPEW, N.Y. — The Depew Fire Department is all volunteer, and two years ago they put together a committee to look into upgrading their outdated radio system.
A week ago, they found out they are getting the second largest grant in the fire department's history to make that happen.
2 On Your Side talked with several firefighters about how this will make the village safer.
Depew Firefighters are out there saving lives with outdated radios from 2003.
"Basically antiquated where they can't get parts, and they can't get replacements, and everything else. You can't buy these types of radios that we have right now," said First Assistant Chief Brian Musielak of the Depew Fire Department.
That's 20 years without any upgrades.
"They're only able to record and also communicate on one channel with us. Our main dispatch channel and our fire ground one, so our other fire ground channels, which we switch to a lot of times for our operations, they're not able to monitor or communicate with us on those channels," Musielak said.
And that puts their lives in danger because if they tried to use two channels, dispatch wouldn't be able to hear a mayday call.
"Sometimes we go to buildings, we're inside a building and the radio communications are not coming out, transmitting outside the building to the chief on the outside, to let them know what's going on because we get some dead spots," Musielak said.
But new technology will fix that.
"If somebody does go down with a mayday call, dispatch can hear that and jump right in and make sure that who ever is running command knows that, you know, that there is a mayday call," past Depew Fire chief Donald Wegst said.
So when they saw that FEMA would be awarding grants to fire departments to help them get new equipment, they applied right away.
"So the Village of Depew benefits quite a bit from us applying for grants because we just don't fiscally have the money in our budget every year to do these upgrades," Wegst said.
The firefighters found out they got the more than $277,000 grant last Friday, and they say the new radios can't come soon enough.
"It's going to put us probably 30 years ahead of time from where we're at right now," Musielak said.
They expect to have the new radios within two years.