The Mechanicsville Volunteers cover approximately 76 square miles, which as you can imagine, includes thousands of homes and hundreds of businesses.
Our diverse first due includes large neighborhoods, commercial developments, industrial and agricultural sites, as well as rural homes and Amish communities.

As the community we serve changes, so have we. Our fire apparatus have iPads with the Active 911 application. This application receives incidents as they are dispatched and maps response routes and shows us important water supply information. While a valuable tool, even GPS can be wrong.

We are currently finishing an approximately 260 page map book that will show every address, hydrant, and draft site in our first due.
It will have measurements marked and will include other hazards responding units need to be aware of.
You might have seen us about in the community checking addresses and knocking on doors verifying information.
As we travel around you might be surprised at some of the things we see.

- Houses with no marked address.
- Houses with an address on their home, but not on the mailbox 1000ft away at the street.
- Black numbers on black mailboxes.
- Houses with a different street address than the street they are accessed from.
- Houses that only have an address from the direction the mail is delivered from!

All of these things can make it difficult to locate your house during an emergency.
We would like to ask everyone to please take a few minutes and check your home and business visibility.
Would your numbers on your mailbox be visible during an emergency response at night, is it marked from both travel directions?

Separately from addresses we are also checking fire hydrants. Metcom is our primary organization responsible for hydrant service and testing.
We are working with them to address issues we have found including;

- Hydrants that have become overgrown with brush.
- Hydrants intentionally obscured by homeowners to cover up the "eyesore"
- Hydrants that have been missed in previous years maintenance.

If you see any of these, please take a few moments and clear around your hydrant.
If you see an overgrown hydrant on your neighbors property, please take a few minutes and have a friendly conversation with them about how you do not want water supply delayed for a fire at your home, because of a hidden hydrant.

It can help us if you check that Google Maps displays your address correctly!