For Immediate Release:

July 22, 2025
Subject: LCFR Announces New Service

Lawrence County Fire Rescue announces a new service aimed at increasing responder safety on highway incidents while also working to reduce secondary crashes on incident scenes. Although the ideology of the program is not new, we are not aware of any fire departments in our State who have began the program. Over the past few years there has been a large increase in Fire Departments participating in the program nationwide.

The program is very similar to one of the services offered by the TDOT HELP program which provides traffic control assistance and many other services to motorists on Interstate Highways. The program places emphasis on providing advanced warning, advanced protective blocking procedures, and total traffic incident management on highway emergency scenes. The program will be operated in compliance with the federal Traffic Incident Management Training System.

Lawrence County is the home of 1,039 miles of County Roads, and over 400 lane miles of State Highway. Our emergency personnel
respond to incidents on these roadways around the clock.

The idea of establishing our own traffic incident safety program has been discussed over the last two years. Earlier this year members of our Box 50 Responder Services Team voiced strong interest in pursuing the establishment of a local program. After several hours of conversation with Traffic Incident Management experts the Box 50 Team decided to begin the required training for the program while also working to obtain a vehicle suitable to be built into a response truck. The team was able to purchase a vehicle locally from Gowen Wholesale. Most of the funds raised for purchasing the vehicle were earned by the team parking cars at a local event called “The Merry Market” and similar events over the past few years. Once the vehicle was purchased the State of the art Whelen Core Warning system, and traffic arrow were donated and installed by a local business. The team at Shannon Precision in Leoma designed and installed a pneumatically operated mount for the arrow board that allows for the traffic arrow to be raised above the response vehicle in order to provide a greater sight distance for the traffic arrow. The necessary traffic cones, signage, reflective vest, and other traffic control equipment for the response vehicle were purchased by Lawrence County Fire Rescue.

The program is slated to go live in the coming days.The response program is being ran primarily by volunteers from the Box 50 Team and supplemented with other volunteers of Lawrence County Fire Rescue.

As always we are thankful for a community who supports our first responders. If you would like to donate to the program or have interest in joining our team, please feel free to contact us!