Private Fire Department Grows
Suburban Phoenix, Arizona, is the home of one of the most unusual fire departments in the country—a private fire department with six fire trucks, a payroll of 25 firemen and 5,000 subscribers. This novel fire-fighting outfit, headed by 25-year-old Louis Witzeman, is featured in the January issue of Pageant magazine in an article titled "He Bought a Fire Engine.”
Witzeman's private enterprise fire department, called the Rural Fire Protection Company, gets its revenue from the sale of annual subscriptions, ranging from $12 up, to homeowners, businessmen and farmers in a 101-squaremile area around Phoenix. It is now the third largest fire department in Arizona, outranked only by the municipal departments of Phoenix and Tucson.
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