Mt. Morris Fire has been awarded the 2005 CEDAP Grant

The Mt. Morris Fire Protection District was awarded a Commercial Equipment Direct Assistance Grant (CEDAP)on September 8th, 2005. The CEDAP grant provides smaller law enforcement and emergency responder agencies with equipment items that will enhance and support response, mutual aid, and interoperability of responder equipment. The total budget for the program was $50 million. Mt. Morris Fire was awarded a thermal imaging system. Thermal imager sense heat, not light and conveys relative temperature levels when encountering objects. A change in contrast and brightness is indicative of the relative temperature level. Thermal imagers are held in a firefighters hand and are about the size of a 2-liter bottle of pop. Firefighters look into a TV screen on the backside of the imager and see the heat. Basically a thermal imager allows firefighters to "see" through smoke. This technology drastically cuts down on the amount of time firefighters take to search a structure looking for victims. By cutting down on the time it takes to find victims their survival rate is dramatically raised.