One of the region’s newest volunteer fire departments has achieved the best fire rating of any fire service in Marion County after the developer of a 9,000-acre mountaintop subdivision agreed to fund the startup firefighting group.
The Jasper Highlands Fire Department, created a year ago after the Foster Falls Volunteer Fire Department said it was not going to service the new mountaintop development near Kimball, Tenn., earned a favorable Class 4 rating from the Insurance Services Office (ISO). The fire protection rating was one of the best for any volunteer fire service in the area and was behind only 80 of Tennessee’s 920 other fire departments, including top-rated city-funded departments like in Chattanooga.
“We’ve worked on organizing and starting more than 75 volunteer fire departments, but this is the first that we’ve worked on that placed this high on its first ISO (Insurance Services Office) rating,” said James F. Wessel, a consultant with Brindlee Mountain Fire Apparatus LLC in Union Grove, Ala., who serves as president of Jasper Highlands Fire Department. “It’s just very unusual to form a new department and to have such dedicated volunteers who are willing to put in so many hours of training and to start out with such good equipment and water supply, especially on top of a mountain.”
Thornton said Friday that he had hoped not to have to have built a new fire department so soon in the development of his 3,000-acre luxury mountaintop development atop Jasper Mountain. But once he determined he had to help create his own fire service, he wanted to make sure it was strong enough to ultimately handle more than 2,000 residential lots he plans to ultimately develop and has adequate equipment and water to get a top rating to keep homeowners’ fire insurance rates low.
This improvement should translate into lower insurance rates of up to 70 percent for residents of Jasper Highlands, compared with the previous rating of Class 10, which the newly formed volunteer fire department inherited.