Stop, Drop and Roll!
The Union Fire Protection District (UFPD) consists of three stations. The UFPD currently has sixty-six members of which 15 are full time paid firefighters and 1 is fire inspector. Our Chief, Deputy Chief and Assistant Chief are all volunteers. The remaining fifty-eight are also volunteer firefighters. The volunteers are paid per call for the incidents to which they respond, from three dollars to seven dollars per call, based upon the number of calls and training drills attended per pay period. The District has sixteen pieces of apparatus ranging from rescue boats to pumpers. We ran 851 incidents in the year 2007, which also includes our assistance to neighboring districts. We have mutual aid agreements with all of our neighboring departments, Region C and state wide mutual aid. We also house and maintain Strike Team 5 Heavy Rescue Truck and Trailer. Thirteen of our members are also members of Strike Team 5.
Our district is a very rural community with the total population in our district around 20,000 people. Our three Stations encompass the city limits of Union, Missouri which has a population of approximately 8,000 people. Union is the county seat for Franklin County. Our district is about 40 percent agricultural, 45 percent residential and 15 percent industrial. The district is located about 45 minutes west of St. Louis, Missouri and covers 96.33 square miles. The Franklin County Adult Detention Center which houses city, county, state and federal prisoners is within our district. We have one nursing home, two assisted living facilities, a number of multi- story businesses, educational and industrial buildings, including East Central College, a large multi-story educational complex. Our district contains Interstate I-44 on the south side, a large sanitation treatment facility and rail line in the center, several AmerenUE substations and four major petroleum pipelines: Explorer, ConocoPhillips, Missouri Pipeline and Enbridge. Orica USA, Inc., a major distributor of high explosives for the state of Missouri and surrounding states has a large magazine storage facility within our district.
