Great Barrington Fire Department

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Great Barrington Fire Department Fire Department for the town of Great Barrington and village of Housatonic

Whether there be fires, medical emergencies, motor vehicle accidents, hazardous
materials incidents, or homeland security threats, the Great Barrington Fire Department is
ready to answer the call. With five engines, a ladder tower, a brush truck, and a rescue
van in two stations, the Fire Department continues to answer the call of the original Hope
Fire Company in 1854 for “strong arms and willing hearts” to protect the inhabitants of
the Town of Great Barrington.

10/22/2026

Bee Gees "Stayin' Alive" official music video, remastered in HD. Su...

10/21/2026

Mother Nature has apparently decided that a fresh layer of kindling blanketing the area was a good idea, and she's been generously spreading it all over town.

With no rain in the forecast, the leaves are getting drier by the day, and before anyone gets creative with a match, we have a few friendly reminders from your friendly firefighters.

First, burning season doesn't begin until January. That means no open burning right now, and even when burning season arrives, you still cannot burn leaves - as cool as little balls of fire look flying through the air - its bad for everyone.

For the love of God, as tempting as it may sound to flick a cigarette into that enormous pile of leaves instead of spending your entire Saturday raking them, PLEASE DON'T. Especially in the fire service we appreciate creative solutions - however yard work by arson gets frowned upon. Dry leaves and wind can make fire spread faster than your kids disappearing when you ask them to help rake.

If you're out there mowing or mulching leaves, keep an eye on your mower's engine and exhaust. Dry leaves collecting around hot equipment can ignite, turning your perfectly ordinary afternoon of yard work into a visit from us and a rather expensive trip to Carr Hardware or Southern Berkshire Power Equipment.

We know the leaves are a nuisance, your back hurts, and somehow the neighbor's trees seem to deposit every single leaf on YOUR lawn. But please, grab a rake, use your leaf blower, or just stare at them angrily until the wind carries them down the street.

Call us if you need us, we'll be here for you.

10/16/2026

We've reached that magical time of year when Saturday morning youth soccer feels more like a survival exercise, parents are wrapped in blankets with coffee cups the size of flowerpots, and everyone is secretly hoping the referee has somewhere else to be.

The outdoor sports seasons are winding down, the lawn has finally stopped growing, and just as you're looking forward to a Saturday doing absolutely nothing, you realize winter is coming and you've accomplished approximately 14% of your outdoor to-do list.

There's patio furniture to put away, hoses to disconnect, firewood to stack, and a garage that hasn't seen a car since the Obama administration.

Here at GBFD, we'd like to remind you of three winter preparation chores that could turn your cozy home into our next place of employment.

1. THE WOOD STOVE AND CHIMNEY

Nothing says Berkshire County quite like a roaring wood stove and someone bragging they haven't bought heating oil since 1997.

Before lighting that first fire, have your chimney inspected and cleaned. Creosote buildup causes chimney fires, and despite what your neighbor tells you, throwing a b**r can into the stove is not a substitute for a chimney sweep.

Keep combustibles away from the stove and dispose of ashes in a covered metal container outside, away from buildings. Those ashes can stay hot for days, considerably longer than most people can remember where they left their reading glasses.

2. SPACE HEATERS AND EXTENSION CORDS

Every family has that one room colder than the meat department Big Y, and someone convinced the solution is a space heater plugged into a power strip already running half the household.

Keep space heaters at least three feet from anything combustible, plug them directly into wall outlets, and turn them off when leaving the room or going to bed.

3. GETTING THE GENERATOR READY

The first storm arrives, the power goes out, and half of Great Barrington retrieves a generator that hasn't run since Hurricane Irene.

After 45 minutes of pulling the starter cord, offering unsolicited mechanical advice, and using language that would embarrass a construction crew, someone finally gets it running and decides the garage is a perfectly reasonable place to operate it.

It isn't.

Generators belong outdoors, at least 20 feet from doors, windows, and vents, with exhaust directed away from the house. Never run one in a garage, even with the door open. Carbon monoxide is invisible, odorless, and deadly. Never backfeed your home's wiring through an outlet, and let the generator cool before refueling.

While you're at it, test your smoke and carbon monoxide alarms. They're considerably cheaper than a visit from us.

We know everyone wants to finish their outdoor chores before the first snowflake, especially here in the Berkshires, where the difference between a beautiful fall afternoon and six inches of wet snow can apparently be about 45 minutes.

Take your time, work safely, and remember that while we genuinely enjoy seeing our neighbors, we'd much rather run into you at Price Chopper than pull up in front of your house with three fire trucks because you figured the chimney could make it just one more season.

Stay warm, stay safe, and good luck with that garage. We both know the car isn't going back in there this winter.

Call us if you need us, we'll be here for you

A little throwback Thursday for Fire prevention week. Today, we take a look at not so much a fire prevention tip, but a...
10/08/2026

A little throwback Thursday for Fire prevention week. Today, we take a look at not so much a fire prevention tip, but a household danger that you may not even know you have.

This "old school" fire extinguisher may be hanging in your basement, in your attic, or even in your living space. They were sold through direct marketing and magazine ads from just before 1870 until about 1940, and were quite popular. In addition to being able to be thrown at the fire, the more recent fire gr***des usually had a bracket assembly that suspended them directly over areas of particular fire risk, like boilers and furnaces. If high temperatures reach some styles of brackets, it would release the gr***de that would then crash and shatter, releasing the fire suppression liquid.

The liquid in the clear glass often had a blue or red coloring agent. In most of the more recent devices, the common type that are usually still around, a fire suppression chemical is likely to be present instead of salt water which was the original design. The chemical of choice was carbon tetrachloride a.k.a. tetrachloromethane, which can be really unhealthy if inhaled, ingested or absorbed. Even worse, when this chemical is exposed to the heat of a fire, it can produce phosgene gas, a chemical weapon used in WWI.

If you have these in your house, be aware of their dangers – you can contact us and we will take them away for you.

Call us if you need us, we'll be here for you!

10/07/2026

As we continue Fire Prevention Week with the fire hazards nobody thinks about until the house smells funny, today we are headed into the laundry room where funny smells can have different meanings.

You know the place, where one sock goes in and never comes back, grass-stained pants somehow multiply, and if you have kids in sports, the dryer has probably been running continuously since Labor Day.

Here is the part nobody thinks about. All that hot air has to go somewhere, and it travels through a dryer vent that slowly fills up with lint, dust, dog hair, and that one tissue that somehow is left in a pocket - repeatedly Given enough time, you have basically built a nice warm tunnel full of kindling behind the dryer.

So, once a year, unplug the dryer, pull it away from the wall, disconnect the vent, and clean the whole works. Vacuum out the dryer connection, the vent pipe, the wall opening, and the outside termination. If you still have one of those old plastic or flimsy foil dryer hoses, congratulations, you own a piece of history, now throw it away and replace it with proper metal ducting.

While you are outside, make sure the exterior vent is actually opening and is not packed full of lint, occupied by birds, or being used as affordable housing by a family of field mice.

Then put everything back together without crushing the vent behind the dryer, which seems obvious, but so does not putting a space heater under a Christmas tree and yet here we are every December.

A clean dryer vent helps your clothes dry faster, saves a little energy, and greatly reduces the odds that your Wednesday night load of towels turns into a neighborhood gathering with flashing red lights.

Call us if you need us, we'll be here for you!

10/06/2026

October is Fire Prevention Month, and this week is Fire Prevention Week, so we figured we’d step things up a notch.

We’re not going to bore you with “check your smoke detectors,” “be careful when cooking,” and “don’t play with matches.” Those are all very important, but hopefully by now they fall somewhere under the general heading of common sense.

Instead, let’s talk about some of the fire hazards that tend to get overlooked.

Today’s topic: overloaded electrical outlets.

This is especially important around here, where plenty of houses were wired back when plugging in a lamp, a radio, and maybe a toaster was considered living pretty extravagantly.

Take a walk around your house. Look behind the couch. Under the bed. Behind the entertainment center. Anywhere you’ve carefully hidden that impressive collection of extension cords and power strips. Ignore the dust bunnies for now - they’ve been living there peacefully for years.

Instead, take a good look at what you have plugged in. If you’ve got a television, space heater, lamp, phone charger, computer, fish tank, coffee maker, Christmas lights from 2019, and three other things plugged into a $4 extension cord you found in the bargain bin, ask yourself one simple question: “Did I make a good decision here?”

It’s kind of like when your mother used to ask, “Do you think you did the right thing?” You already knew the answer.

And now is your opportunity to fix it.

Don’t overload outlets or extension cords. Avoid using extension cords as permanent wiring. And be particularly careful with high-draw appliances like space heaters, which should be plugged directly into a proper wall outlet.

Because just like those old Saturday morning cartoons, there will eventually be that little voice sitting on your shoulder saying, “I told you so.” Unfortunately, it’s considerably less funny when you’re standing in the front yard in your slippers watching us put out your living room.

Call us if you need us, we’ll be here for you.

Last Monday night, GBFD hosted area fire departments for training and hands-on setup of our mobile decontamination unit....
09/30/2026

Last Monday night, GBFD hosted area fire departments for training and hands-on setup of our mobile decontamination unit. Thank you to Heather Barbieri from Fairview Hospital for coordinating the training, and to everyone who came out to work through the setup together.

That big yellow tent in the photos isn’t a new bouncy house for the firehouse - it is a heated multi-pass decontamination unit that provides privacy to strip contaminated clothing in 4 "changing rooms", areas to be hosed down with warm water, a track-way to run non-ambulatory patients through, and an area to redress in provided clean clothing. This unit gives us a way to set up decontamination more quickly and with fewer people, which matters when every minute and every available responder counts.

Decontamination, or “decon,” is the process of removing hazardous substances from people and equipment before those substances can spread to others, ambulances, hospitals or homes. I am sure some of us have changed diapers that we could deem as Haz-Mat - but that is not what this is for. Decon could be needed after a major chemical spill or tanker rollover. It could also be needed when someone gets pesticides or pool chemicals on their clothing, or someone not following the teachers directions in a science lab. The scale changes, but the goal is the same: remove the hazard before it spreads.

If you’re involved in an incident where contamination may be possible, move away from the immediate danger, tell responders what happened and follow their directions. Please don’t leave the scene or drive yourself somewhere else without speaking to responders first. Keeping the contamination from spreading helps protect you and everyone coming to help.

Preparing for the worst so we’re ready when you need us.

Address

37 State Road
Great Barrington, MA
01230

Telephone

+14135280788

Website

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