Background

Anderson Township Fire Department provides fire protection for all of Anderson and Clark Township and part of Troy, Union, and Tobin townships.  We keep an active roster of 35 volunteer firefighters. Our response area is about 200 square miles and serves about 987 members and about 4000 lives. This necessitates us to operate two fire houses located in St. Marks and Bristow to maintain a safe response time average.  We have agreements for secondary response to six other fire departments in Perry County with a primary automatic dual response during the daytime hours of 6:00 am to 6:00 pm for two other departments due to the lack of responding personnel that work outside of the county and are unable to respond. This requires us to cover a huge area with any kind of fire imaginable:

1. Manufacturing – a casting mill industry with 400 employees, various lumber industry facilities, secondary response to a foundry  with 975 additional employees.
2. Airport – Perry County airport which houses approximately a dozen  propeller and jet planes
3. School – we have dual simultaneous response to Perry Central K-12 School with 1200 students and 120 staff.
4. Agriculture – our population is intermingled with large farms with their incumbent hazards of grain and hay storage, animal buildings, anhydrous ammonia and liquid nitrogen storage.
5. State and National forest – we have response agreements to respond to fires in over 25,000 acres of USDA  and Indiana State Forest.
6. Prison – we have agreements for secondary response to Branchville Correctional Facility which houses over 1000 inmates and 400 staff.
7. Interstate and Indiana State highways –  primary response to several miles of Interstate 64 and over 38 miles of State highway with traffic counts of over 21,000 daily

We are primarily funded by membership dues which is $40 per residence.  We run a utility vehicle raffle yearly to maintain a capital improvements fund.  We receive some other funds from Indiana DNR, community foundation grants, and occasional private donations amounting to less than 5% of our $45,000 yearly budget.