Pipeline company sends trucks, gear to local fire services

Vital pieces of firefighting equipment are being donated this week to services in Dilley and La Salle County by the Plains All American Pipeline company to help supplement the fleets of local departments responsible for responding to a wide range of emergencies.

Vehicles being presented to the Dilley Volunteer Fire Department include a specialized “snorkel” firefighting truck and a command van, both of which will be put into service immediately, according to VFD Chief AJ Gonzales in an interview Tuesday.

“We are ecstatic about this donation,” the volunteer fire chief said. “These vehicles are definitely usable and will be much appreciated.

“It is important for us to be able to respond to an emergency by setting up a command post and providing the specialized equipment required to meet the emergency,” Gonzales said. “We have always been able to use any donation, and this one is especially valuable to us.

“The pipeline company operates in South Texas, but not necessarily in the immediate Dilley area,” the fire chief added, “but they recognize the need for response from a fire department in this region, where we have interstate traffic, oilfield, and agricultural situations that may require our response, and that’s a very wide scope of demand. This equipment helps us serve our community better and respond to the different needs that arise in our area.”

Extra firefighting apparatus being donated by Plains to the services headquartered in Dilley and Cotulla includes masks and firefighter gear.

“This is vital equipment in any situation,” La Salle County Fire Rescue Assistant Chief Gilbert Martinez said shortly before the official presentation this week. “We appreciate the donation, and we are speaking not only on behalf of all the emergency responders in our wide coverage area but also the South Texas residents who will be better served by this emergency equipment.”

La Salle County’s fire brigade will receive a ladder truck and an ambulance that may be converted to what Martinez described as heavy rescue.

“The equipment that Plains is donating will supplement any fire rescue service’s inventory, but in South Texas it is all the more important to a service like ours because of the scope of response that we provide,” the assistant chief said. “We may be called to an accident on the interstate or to an energy industry disaster, or to a wildfire… We have to be able to answer every call with the right equipment, sometimes to more than one incident at a time across the county, and this donation goes a long way towards helping us do that.”

Both fire services were represented Tuesday afternoon, March 26, for the official presentation at the Plains office near Gardendale.

The total value of the equipment being given to the two services tops $110,000, and the donation is being made by Plains in memory of one of its employees, Mike Page, who died in 2023.

“Mike was active in the emergency response community and was well-known for his work and support of local first responders,” the company noted in a press release this week. “The donated equipment traveled more than 1,650 miles from Plains’ terminal in Virginia to be delivered to the fire departments in South Texas.”

The donation was made through Plains’ First Responder Grant Program, which funds the resource and training needs of non-profit emergency response and public safety organizations in the communities where Plains operates. Funds supplied through the program support improvements that will have “a lasting, measurable impact and a direct benefit to the safety or preparedness of response organizations,” according to the company.

Headquartered in Houston, Plains All American Pipeline owns and operates midstream energy infrastructure and provides logistics services for crude oil and natural gas liquids. The company owns a network of pipeline gathering and transportation systems, in addition to terminal services, storage, processing, fractionation and other infrastructure assets serving key producing basins, transportation corridors and major market hubs and export outlets in the United States and Canada. The company reports that it handles an average of more than 8 million barrels per day of crude oil and natural gas liquids.