Inside Darley October 2014

Hi I’m Paul Darley and thanks for tuning into our October issue of Inside Darley.

As you’re probably aware, National Fire Prevention Week is October 5th through 11th. We encourage you to check out your smoke detectors and make sure those are working properly. Change your batteries if they are battery operated. What you might not be aware of is that the National Fire Prevention week was started to commemorate the great Chicago fire of 1871, so that certainly hits home here at Darley. If you want information on that, you can share with your community or your family, we encourage you to go to www.NFPA.org. They have a great section just on National Fire Prevention Week. NFPA is a great source of information and our first attachment here is the Fire Loss Report for 2013. This just came out in the last couple of days; we anxiously await the report each year. The report reported that in 2013, there were 1,240,000 fires in the United States.  That represented 4% of all calls that fire departments made during the year. That trend continues to go down drastically over the years. The number of fires was actually down 9.8% from previous years but the fires that we are having are more significant. In fact, damage from those fires was up 13.5%. During the year, there were 3,240 civilians killed in fires and they caused roughly $11.5 billion dollars worth of damage. What might come as a surprise to you is that only 39% of those were actual structure fires, 15% were vehicle fires and 46% of those fires happened outside of the household. We’d encourage you to look at this report. If you’re in a fire station, you’ll be the smartest guy in the station if you go through this data and if you’re someone who markets to the fire service and you are looking for trends and what the true needs are of the fire service, we think you will find some great information there.

While we’re on statistics, the FAMA (Fire Apparatus Manufacturers Association) released their statistics for the second quarter of new fire truck sales.  Those continue to be fairly flat and down year over year, compared to 2013. Hopefully that trend will reverse itself in the third quarter. Just anecdotally speaking with fire truck sales people and equipment sales people, everyone is reporting for the most part that the third quarter was stronger than the previous two quarters. I think the jury is still out on that but that’s good information to hear. A good shot in the arm is that the AFG grant sets 2014 assistance to firefighter grant program is supposed to open up in the month of October. If you’re interested, if you’re in a fire department interested in getting a grant for your department, you generally only have two to three weeks to apply for those grants. It closes pretty quickly. Also good news for 2015, congress has passed a continuing resolution, where funding for both the AFG Grant as well as the Safer Grant, looks to be protected at $340 million dollars each for next year. That’s great news.

On a distributor end, our international agents and distributors have been asking for a long time for an un-priced catalog. We’ve recently printed one of those. Our second attachment is that un-priced catalog. If you’re a distributor of ours and are interested in that, simply download this copy. If you’d like printed copies of that, reach out to us. You can email my assistant, Dawn Hjelmgren at DawnH@Darley.com and she will get those right out to you.

The last attachment here is actually our Fall/Winter issue of our Darley Times. It’s just filled with information and on page 2 and 3, you will find information on our new water purification products that we are selling and having great success both in humanitarian and military applications. On page 4, we’ve got our new Ultra-High Pressure and CAFs demo trucks available. So, if you would like to see a demonstration on either one of those products, reach out to us and we will arrange that for you. On page 5, you will see Mike Ruthy, our Chief Engineer, who talks about our new ZS Pump and the different configurations that it’s available with, along with a complete article on our new electronically controlled pump panels, which are getting a lot of accolades out there. On page 6 and 7, you’ll find Darley in the news on different things from Ex-Im Bank visiting us to different awards and helping different local colleges and our Lea program that we’ve implemented here at Darley over the past year that we are particularly proud of.

For our military customers, if you’re going to be out at the AUSA show October 13th through 15th, we hope you will stop off and visit us. That’s the Army show. We are going to be in booth #3233 and look forward to hopefully seeing you.

Thanks for tuning into this issue of Inside Darley. If there’s anything we can be doing to support you, we hope you’ll reach out to us.

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