Mark Hardin’s heart sank when he saw the bank account balance for his town’s volunteer fire department last month: $169. Firefighters in Calhoun, Mo., desperately needed new gear and they’d been using the same equipment since the 1980s.
“It was pretty discouraging — we’d already been paying for stuff out of our own pockets to keep things going,” said Hardin, a retired firefighter from Arkansas who is now volunteer fire chief for Calhoun, which has a population of about 5oo people.
