In November of 2023, a house on Secret Lake Road in Avon, a neighborhood of narrow streets and lakeside houses, caught fire in the middle of the night. The Avon Volunteer Fire Department (AVFD) received the call at 3:13 a.m. and by 3:30 a.m. Avon fire crews were at the house and made a call for additional help from the Canton Volunteer Fire Department (CVFD), according to a posting on AVFD’s social media page. 

The fire was extinguished 45 minutes later, no one was hurt as the residents weren’t home at the time, but the house was a total loss. The fifteen minutes it took to get fire trucks and crews to the scene would appear to be an adequate response time, except for the fact that there was an Avon fire station – Company 2 – with two fire trucks in the garage just 1,500 feet from the Secret Lake home, a distance that could be walked in a matter of minutes.

The home was also roughly two miles from Canton’s neighboring Station 2 firehouse just over the border on Canton Springs Road, but CVFD wasn’t alerted to the situation until 3:29 a.m., and for one long-time professional firefighter, who also volunteered for the AVFD for 33 years, this was unacceptable.

Michael Farrell, who now volunteers with the Canton Fire Department, says the AVFD has quietly let the Secret Lake firehouse sit idle and un-staffed for two years, even as fires have occurred in the Secret Lake neighborhood, including a fire that occurred practically across the street from the fire house.

“They have a fire station there, everybody is paying the same mill rate, they’re paying their taxes, but that fire station is all window dressing. Here’s a fire in a residential building 1,500 feet from the fire house and nobody goes, the fire engine never even left the fire house,” Farrell said. “To me, it’s akin to the police department or the ambulance company writing off a section of town. The problem is the Avon fire department isn’t saying it, they’re just doing it, and nobody knows about it, it’s a big dirty little secret in Avon.”

Farrell says that after 33 years of volunteering with the Avon fire department, he was expelled over “philosophical differences,” in 2013. 

Farrell also knows the family who lost their home in November, and it prompted him to make a post on the AVFD’s Facebook page writing that “the ugly truth,” was that Avon has left the Secret Lake station unmanned and that this is causing longer response times to get to the Secret Lake, Lakeview and Cherry Brook neighborhoods that would typically be serviced by the Secret Lake fire house.

The post was taken down by the page administrator within an hour and Farrell from blocked from the AVFD’s page, but he says this issue should concern a large swath of northwestern Avon residents and residents in Canton, just over the border.

“They were almost 15 minutes into their response before they called Canton and Canton’s fire engine arrived at that fire before some of Avon’s fire engines did. So my question is, how much longer are they going to continue to pull this ruse over the taxpayers?” Farrell said. “This is one of the most remote areas for the Avon Fire Department to get into, so they’re longest response times from their other stations. Canton is literally a mile down the road.”

While fire departments maintain mutual aid agreements with other neighboring towns to call for backup and assistance to handle fires, there is currently no automatic aid agreement in place with Canton in which both departments would be automatically dispatched to a fire in that area, even though the Canton fire house is closer. The next closest Avon fire station is Station 3, slightly less than three miles away.

AVFD Chief Bruce Appell, says there may be some “lag time” in getting to the Secret Lake area, but there is little difference between what Avon can respond to from its next closest fire house and Canton. Unlike the other three fire stations in Avon, which are owned by the town, the Secret Lake fire station is owned by the AVFD.

“The canton fire house is less than two miles away. Our other two fire houses are close to three miles away, so not much difference, and they’re down main roads to get there,” Appell said. “So pretty much there’s a little bit of lag time versus that station but it’s not drastic. These trucks aren’t coming clear across town to get there.”

Appell says that it comes down to a staffing issue. Avon, like many towns, has a volunteer fire department and, more and more, they lack the volunteers needed, particularly in the Secret Lake area, and the Secret Lake members that they do have are currently doing their training at other fire houses in Avon.

“It’s really a nationwide issue to recruit volunteers and the challenge in that area is it’s a very small community,” Appell said. “The problem is that fire house sits right on the town line, less than 1,000 feet from the town of Canton, so when we’re looking to recruit firefighters over the years we’ve gotten members from that community, it ebbs and flows over the years.”

“Unless I have a core of people who live in the area, it’s tough to do training with only a handful of members. And then trying to staff, okay, when are those persons available?” Appell said, adding that they don’t want to “poach” volunteers from Canton because Canton has the same issue with maintaining enough volunteers to answer calls and staff fire houses. 

Volunteer fire departments across the state are struggling to recruit new members, according to the Hartford Courant in 2023, which interviewed Appell and other fire chiefs about the difficulty in getting enough people to commit to the training and answering the call, but Farrell says the town should be more upfront about its challenges and the potential effect on residents.

“Over time, membership waxes and wanes, Avon being no different, but Avon tends to keep its challenges close to the chest,” Farrell said. “Automatic aid agreements are not a foreign concept at all at fire departments across the nation. For some reason, these guys want to maintain their own little fiefdom and not establish it.”

Although an automatic aid agreement with Canton would send the nearby Canton fire house to fires in Secret Lake where the Canton border crosses, Appell says such an agreement could potentially drain resources from both towns.

“The reason why a lot of people don’t want to go with automatic aid is because they’re in the same boat, they don’t have enough manpower to cover their calls so they don’t want to seem like they’re guaranteeing coverage to Avon — like Avon should protect Avon, Canton should protect Canton,” Appell said. “We’re all willing to help when it’s needed but there’s that stigma of doing it automatically all the time.”

Appell says that to date there have been no efforts made to establish an automatic aid agreement with Canton even though the Secret Lake fire house is unmanned and mostly unused, although, he says, the fire police members do use the station for Monday night drills.

However, Canton Volunteer Fire Department Chief Jon Gotaski, disputes that claim, saying that when he and other fire chiefs in the Farmington Valley, who convene at Task Force 54 meetings, were told “two summers ago” the Secret Lake fire house would no longer be staffed, he offered to establish an automatic aid agreement.

“We’ve offered and haven’t gotten anything official when we were notified they were not really staffing the station in Avon in Secret Lake,” Gotaski said. “I had my concerns about that. Predominantly, they have to come through Canton to get into Secret Lake. There are some ways they can get in through the Avon side, but they’re really back roads. Their best shot is coming through my town.”

“I had made mention of it, to no prevail, nothing was ever put in writing,” Gotaski continued. “I don’t know why people wouldn’t want automatic mutual aid. I don’t know if people are afraid to let others play in their sandbox. The settings of volunteer fire departments now a days, people have to be more open to working together. The end of the day, everybody is going to the same fires.”

Gotaski says Canton has responded to mutual aid calls from Avon into Secret Lake three times in the past two years, including one instance when CVFD was the first truck to arrive on the scene. Canton also has paid firefighters who work during the day at some of their stations and Gotaski says they are available and on call to respond for automatic aid.

Despite Canton’s offer to other towns for these paid firefighters to assist, no one has taken them up on it yet. “The other towns are aware, including Avon,” Gotaski said.

Closure of the Secret Lake fire house has been considered for upwards of twenty years, Appell says. The narrow roads and speed bumps limit how fast fire trucks can move through the neighborhood and create wear and tear on the trucks. Because of where it is situated, the Secret Lake fire house has a longer response time getting into other sections of Avon where their trucks might be needed. It’s not only a matter of response times getting into the Secret Lake area, but also out of it.

In June of 2023, the Avon Town Council created the Avon Volunteer Fire Department Fire Station Expansion, Renovation and Building Committee, charged with plotting the future of fire response in Avon, including fire station expansions and equipment upgrades. As part of the committee’s work, a study was conducted by the Center for Governmental Research with input from a number of town officials, including Appell.

Among the study’s findings, the Secret Lake fire station, “no longer functions well as a fire station,” and “The company associated with the station has been reassigned. The apparatus at this station do not typically respond to calls.” The report noted that the Secret Lake station cannot be “reasonably upgraded to modern standards.”

The study also noted that there are 170 volunteers for the AVFD, but only 58 were recognized as “active firefighters,” with another nine that serve in the fire police role. Based on surveys, more than half the volunteers said they were likely to continue volunteering, but 70 percent reporting the department should make more efforts to retain members.

“Responses indicate a split in attitudes within the department, as some respondents report a positive experience while others report a negative one,” the report said, although it could not find any “clear patterns” of who was dissatisfied.

Among the recommendations made by CGR was that Avon enter into an automatic aid agreements. “AVFD should establish automatic aid agreements whereby neighboring departments are requested at the time of dispatch for certain calls,” the report said. “The automatic assistance should also be considered for calls in certain areas of towns such as near Secret Lake or on the ridge in the eastern part of Avon.”

And despite the recommendation by CGR that the town consider assigning duty shifts to assure fire stations are staffed, Appell says it is a difficult proposition.

“We’re in the process of looking at all our options to implement something but that takes time, and we have to figure out how we can implement it because it is volunteer,” Appell said. “There are other departments that do assigned shifts and we’re looking at that, but it would be a big change for the department operation.”

“We have no plans to get rid of that [Secret Lake] fire house. Our plan is to keep companies there, keep engineers, keep equipment there, keep utilizing it for the neighborhood. But if we talk about a staffing model probably our staffing would be at company three that is near the high school. It’s not feasible right now to cover every fire house,” Appell said. “Because that station is so close to the border of Canton, when we look at response times, it’s back into Avon, because if I’m putting staffing there, I have to look at the response times back into Avon, not what it could do for Canton or somebody else.”

“I don’t care what color the truck is or what is says on the side of the door, if somebody’s house is on fire I want the closest resource,” Gotaski says, “and I think that the taxpayer ultimately at the end of the day wants that as well, so people need to learn how to let other people play in their sandbox.”

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