The Brockville and area community never ceases to amaze me.  It seems that whenever we have specific needs this community comes through.  This has been very evident this week.  With 3 firetrucks mechanically ready to go but a lot of cleaning and polishing left to do, the St. Lawrence College Pre-Service Fire Fighter School brought over their students who spent two days completing a job that would have taken our 4 Firefighter volunteers a couple of weeks to complete and certainly not in time for the shipment.  These students worked really hard and left these rigs shining!  Many thanks to Captain Gary Rutley, program coordinator at St Lawrence College for volunteering his students and of course to the students themselves who did a fantastic job!  Here are a couple of pictures of them hard at work:

Here they all are posing for picture on the ladder truck:

The trucks are ready to go but we are still looking for another $20,000 to pay for the shipping!

Last night saw a lot of volunteers helping with the food box packing.  We had Rotary Club members from both Brockville and Prescott as well as Air Cadets from the 870 Vampire Squadron, local students and of course CAC members helping to set a new record.  We packed over 600 food boxes in just over 2 hours!  These boxes contain flour, sugar, rice, pasta, canned meat, coffee, tea, peanut butter, jam and several other basic staples that will make a huge difference in many family and seniors lives.  Especially at this time of year when preserves are running low.  We still have many boxes left available for sale at $50/box including hand delivery.  Here are some of our hard working volunteers on the assembly line:

We have volunteers of all ages including this 5 year old who worked very hard clearing empty boxes from the assembly line:

We had a visit from both CKWS TV from Kingston and CBC today.  They had both caught wind of the terrific work our fire fighters were doing and wanted to get the story.  Here Chris Harvey of CKWS sets up the shot in preparation for interviewing Ken Sine our lead fire fighter on this initiative:

Click here to watch the news report.

This has been a big week with a lot more action to come.  We will be accepting family parcels this weekend and will start loading the containers next week, so stay tuned.

Eric McKenzie