Why does it seem so ironic when a fire station is lost to flames? Is it because we think fire stations are constructed of some space age flame retardant material? Or is it because we believe that some higher power should be watching over the structures that protect us? One has to admit that these romantic thoughts are somewhat foolish. After all, these buildings are made of the same materials that burn in our houses. And these buildings are heated with the same furnaces that start fires in our garages. And these buildings are wired with the same occasionally faulty outlets that start electrical fires in our businesses. This is reality.

Great Valley Volunteer Fire Company of Great Valley, New York was welcomed to its reality on March 26,1995 when its firehouse burned to the ground in the middle of the night. A nearby fireman who saw the flames and believed it to be a woodpile burning near the firehouse alerted the rest of the department. Firefighters arrived to discover that their firehouse could not be saved. It was too late. They had lost everything.

Emergencies wait for no one, and nobody knows that better than rescue personnel. Building or no building, equipment or no equipment, members of the Great Valley Volunteer Fire Company knew that they still had a job to do. The very next day after the fire they held a meeting to create a plan of action. They immediately found an empty warehouse to rent and stocked it with equipment loaned from fire companies from as far away as Pennsylvania and Buffalo, New York.

After assuring the community's safety with the warehouse and borrowed equipment, the company formed a building committee to handle the rebuilding process. The committee contacted Wayne Neudeck, Sales Consultant at the Morton Buildings construction center in Warsaw, New York. Neudeck worked with the building committee for almost a week, showing them brochures, videos, and photos, before the committee found the perfect building design on the cover of Morton's 1995 calendar. Keith Litchfield, Assistant Fire Chief and Chairman of the Building Committee, remembers, "All of a sudden, one guy grabbed a calendar and said, "That's it! That's our building!' and threw the thing on the table. We took a look at it, and we said, 'Yep, that's it!'"

Eight days after the fire, and after receiving bids from several other building companies, the committee voted to have Morton Buildings construct its new firehouse. "Speed and cost," replies Litchfield when asked why the committee chose Morton. "The competition was quoting a similar type structure and Morton could do it quicker and for comparable cost... The thing that is key is that Morton is a very responsive builder. They responded to our needs. They had the expertise to do what needed to be done. We didn't spend a lot of time figuring out what needed to be done because Morton has put up thousands and thousands of buildings. That experience could be drawn upon."