Hi, I’m Paul Darley, and thanks for tuning into our September issue of Inside Darley. There is so much going on in the world and our country right now that is impacting you our first responder customers. I mean everything from the wildfires, and hurricanes, to the riots, and on top of that the pandemic, all of our hearts and minds go out to all of you who are being impacted.
Our first attachment is the FAMA/FEMSA fall newsletter. Our very own James Long is serving as the president of FEMSA. I’d like to call your attention to the FAMA article on page three. It talks about new fire apparatus orders in 2020. The article compares quarter two 2020 with quarter one. Which found a 41% decline, but more importantly, it compares the second quarter of 2020 with the second quarter in 2019, which shows a decline of 25%. The fire service is certainly taking a hit, on top of all the expenditures it has. Hopefully, real-estate values and sales tax, which contributes to first responders remains strong, along with federal funding such as the Cares Act. Our second article talks about the cares act funding, so take a look at that if you received one of those grants.
The third article we attached, was given to us by Gary Briese. It’s a white paper on the 21st-century fire services. It’s got great stuff in here, it’s a 100-year plan for the fire services. It was written pre-COVID, but it talks a lot about the need for PPE and the growing wildfire trends.
You know when you are looking at PPE, keep Darley in mind. We’ve got millions of dollars in stock of PPE anything from masks, hand sanitizers, all the way to remote thermometers you name it, keep us in mind.
We are looking at more of a macro level, and our fourth attachment is the fortune 500 CEOs survey that recently came out. They asked these CEOs all types of questions from when do you think economic activity will be back, when will business travel be back, when will your office be back to 90% normal? And oddly enough 26% of the respondents said never if you can imagine. Some interesting stuff here.
We at Darley continue to talk about the pandemic with our team. We are in the 3rd inning of this baseball game, when the pandemic is over it will be the end of the 9th inning. So we are trying to balance realism with optimism here, and as a company, we are continuing to be very cautious and putting our employees first.
It’s interesting too to see the number of companies doing a digital transformation. Good job to Emergency One and Rev Group for their recent digital platform that they ran with Fire Apparatus Magazine. We here at Darley have been doing a ton of webinars. In fact, Smart Firefighting recently had a great one talking about virtual reality training in the fire service, which featured Bobby Halton.
And while you are here today, Please take a minute to look around the new Darley.com website. It’s a project we have been working on for several years, and we are proud to have it launched. If you see any problems or want to see some changes, we would love to hear from you.
Thanks for tuning into this issue of Inside Darley, if there is anything we can be doing to support you, we hope you reach out to us.
