August 27, 2020
By: Dwayne Page
DeKalb County Volunteer Firefighter Blake Cantrell has been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant.
Chief Donny Green made the announcement during Monday night’s county commission meeting. Joining Chief Green in making the Lieutenant helmet presentation to Cantrell were Captain Jay Cantrell and Lieutenant Dusty Johnson.
“Blake is one of our firefighters at the Cookeville Highway Station. We have a promotion process in the fire department where firefighters have a pathway to be promoted to rank. This involves written testing, practical skills testing, and leadership development. Blake has been a candidate for the office of Lieutenant. He has been working on that for a few years now. He has previously served as our department’s communications officer. He spends a lot of his time programming our pagers and radios, working on radios and getting stuff into the shop, etc. He demonstrated some exceptional leadership skills even before he got here for this promotion. He officially began as Lieutenant July 15. We wanted to share this with you. This is your fire department and I want you to know who your leaders are. This team does a tremendous job in leading our fire department across the 12 stations in our county,” said Chief Green.
Green also updated the commissioners on a $427,360 Assistance to Firefighters Grant the county has been awarded for the fire department. The AFG Program is administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.
The funding award will be used to purchase Self-contained Breathing Apparatuses (SCBA’s) and associated equipment to serve all 12 of the department’s stations across the county. The Federal share of this award is $407,009.52 and the local matching share, to be provided by the DeKalb County Government, is $20,350.48.
“We got this grant about two weeks ago in the amount of $427,000 to replace our self contained breathing apparatus. To tell you what that means, those have 15 year life cycles on them and ours are 15 years old. Had we not gotten this grant we would have been coming to you (county commission) for 427,000 for this life saving equipment. The county’s part of that is 5% so we’re paying $20,000 for $407,000 worth of equipment. We’re proud to get this federal money to help us out on these local expenses,” said Chief Green.