Reviving Vintage Fire Sirens in Small-Town America with Richard Twomey

0:00:00 Richard Twomey: So if something goes down with the radio system, you don’t have a secondary means of alerting your firemen. And that’s why these whistles are sometimes employed in these, in these surrounding towns that have a reliable volunteer fire department.

0:00:19 Sophie Eden: Join us as we dive into the wild world of government auctions and take you behind the scenes to uncover the cool and unique ways bidders from across America are utilizing the items they’ve won on Municibid, like an ambulance repurposed into a work truck, to a city bus converted into an RV, and so much more. Welcome to the Municibid Podcast.

0:00:45 Sophie Eden: Hi, Richard. How are you doing today?

0:00:48 Richard Twomey: Very well.

0:00:49 Sophie Eden: Great. Thank you so much for hopping on. So can you start us off by introducing yourself and a little bit about what you do?

0:00:59 Richard Twomey: Certainly. My name is Richard Twomey, and I am a structural fire protection engineer degree from the University of Maryland, and I’ve been involved in the fire service about 40 years as both volunteer and for a metropolitan fire department. I do a lot of work with surplus property and municipal vehicles in my spare time, and I’ve been a Municibid member for about two years now.

0:01:24 Sophie Eden: Wonderful. Wow. So, can you tell us a bit more about what a day in the life is of a fire structural engineer?

0:01:35 Richard Twomey: Fire protection engineers are degreed engineers, just as you have a mechanical, electrical, civil, environmental engineering. It’s a specialization that’s offered by the University of Maryland, one other university in the country that offers this degree. I graduated from the program approximately 40 years ago and have worked in the field ever since college completed. Fire protection engineers deal with life safety in buildings and in areas where our expertise are needed for life safety.

0:02:04 Richard Twomey: Fire protection measures, fire alarm systems, automatic sprinkler systems, and structural fire protection, both active and passive. And it’s a field that emerged in the 1950s and is still producing graduates today.

0:02:19 Sophie Eden: Incredible. Can you tell us about one of your favorite auction wins on Municibid?

0:02:26 Richard Twomey: Oh, certainly. I’ve had approximately 15 auction bids on Municibid. One of the ones was for a 1983 federal signal fire sirens, primarily used in the northwest for tornado warning, but it was also employed for volunteer fire departments to summon their people for alarms. And this one I had purchased was out in central Pennsylvania, about an hour west of State College. It was an older whistle that had fallen off of a tower, and the municipality put it up for bid because they were not going to restructure the steel to put it back up where it needed to go.

0:03:05 Richard Twomey: So they just ended the life of the siren. At the time I had a friend in an adjoining volunteer fire company who had asked me if I could assist them with fixing their whistle, which was down. And I had expertise in doing this from the 1980s, and I’m one of the few people that still dabbles in these things. So I went over and took a look at it, and I said, well, we’re going to have to set it up to have the motor rebuilt. In the meantime, I have one that I think I can get down here that I just want on a public auction, and we’ll put it in service temporarily until your other one is repaired.

0:03:34 Richard Twomey: So we drove out to western Pennsylvania, picked up the siren from this municipality, and drove it all the way back to New Jersey for a four hour trip and offloaded it and began the restoration work, which consisted of sanding and priming and painting at three quotes and getting it ready to go, put it back in service. So we completed the work at the end of last summer and put it back up with the assistance of another fire department that had a tower ladder truck.

0:04:05 Richard Twomey: And we hooked up the electrical connections, tested it, and it works. They’re back to what they were before.

0:04:11 Sophie Eden: Wow. So how did you learn to restore these sirens?

0:04:18 Richard Twomey: Well, I’ve always had a hobby of restoring older equipment. A lot of times in the fire service, equipment gets beat up and broken and is in need of being restored and repaired and repainted. So as time went on and I was growing up in my teens, I learned how to do a lot of restoration work in terms of sanding and stripping and priming and painting and how to use a spray paint gun, et cetera, et cetera. So I use these talents over the years to restore a lot of things that I’ve come across historical items for the fire service, and I’ve worked on those things ever since.

0:04:54 Sophie Eden: For people brand new to restoring sirens, how would you recommend they learn how to do it and get started?

0:05:02 Richard Twomey: Well, there’s kind of a cult following of these things on YouTube and on eBay, et cetera. People that out there look for these things that have worked on them in the past or have restored them in the past. And there’s a lot of good videos on YouTube regarding restorations of what people did and how they went about it and what they employed these whistles for. A lot of them just keep them as a yard ornament.

0:05:28 Richard Twomey: I have only purchased them in the past and restored them to put them back in service for fire departments that might need them.

0:05:35 Sophie Eden: And which fire department did the siren that you purchased one from Municibid and restored, go back into service for it?

0:05:45 Richard Twomey: Went back in service, I believe, at the end of August. And it was for the borough of Jamesburg, which is a small municipality in central New Jersey, about 40 minutes south of New York.

0:05:55 Sophie Eden: How did you find out that Jamesburg needed a new siren?

0:06:01 Richard Twomey: Well, the chief of the fire department had called me and asked me if I could come take a look at their existing siren that had been up since prior to World War II. And this town had what was called a fire alarm box system, where if you needed to turn alarm in, you’d went to a street corner and pulled a box, and it would blow the siren and tap out the alarm for the firemen to respond. This goes back to the 1930s, and the whistle had a motor in it, and the motor, over time, the windings go bad, they get old. And in this case, some birds had taken up nesting in the housing and a whistle and basically decimated the interior workings of it. So after we sent it out for rehabilitation, we learned from the motor shop that it was going to be cost prohibitive to try to put it back in service.

0:06:46 Richard Twomey: It was going to cost thousands of dollars. So this savings of being able to get this motor and this new whistle and put it up in place saved probably about $10,000 in work and procurement and then execution of putting it into service.

0:07:03 Sophie Eden: Wow. And is it so costly because there are certain parts that you can’t get anymore?

0:07:10 Richard Twomey: Well, that’s exactly it. These are no longer manufactured. This model is no longer manufactured. There’s newer models out there, but they really, I think, underperform for what we used back years ago. And this one was really a solid test proven, really used all over the country, kind of whistle. And we were able to get it rehabbed and put it back in service. And the cost of the siren was minimal. And I just decided with the effort and the friendships I’ve had through the years with this fire department that I would just donate it to them, which is what I did.

0:07:47 Richard Twomey: So the cost of the siren rehab and then the electrical work was all performed by me, and I just wrote it off as a donation to them because they’re good people.

0:07:56 Sophie Eden: Wonderful. That’s very kind of you. And has this been the only fire department that you’ve restored and donated a siren to?

0:08:07 Richard Twomey: I’ve had luck with other municipalities getting rid of these whistles for one reason or another, and I’ve restored two or three others for some additional towns in the area and put those up in place of ones that have burned out, that are no longer usable. Sometimes just the cost of rebuilding the motors is prohibitive, and you just don’t want to spend that kind of money when there’s other things that you’re dealing with in a fire department to come in compliance with state regulations and with trying to keep your apparatus up to snuff and keeping everything moving so that you’re able to respond.

0:08:40 Richard Twomey: So the alerting whistles really are a secondary form of alerting the fire department. Normally, it’s done over radio pagers or connections to iPhones or to smartphones, rather, and those connections are all done by radio waves. So if something goes down with the radio system, you don’t have a secondary means of alerting your firemen. And that’s why these whistles are sometimes employed in these surrounding towns that have a reliable volunteer fire department. They’re utilized as a secondary backup means to alert the firemen.

0:09:13 Richard Twomey: And that’s what this whistle does. It’s heard all around town, and it alerts people both day and night.

0:09:21 Sophie Eden: Can you tell us more about the history of Jamesburg? And back in the day, there was no 911 or, like, phones as we know them today, right? So can you explain more about that history and how that worked?

0:09:37 Richard Twomey: The outdoor sirens go back to the 1920s. They were made primarily just for alerting firemen in large areas. But as time went on, with the advent of World War II and the cold War and so forth, these really came to the fore in the 1950s with civil defense and where these fire departments would use them for alerting their members. There were also certain codes in timing of the siren rising and falling. That meant either an attack or take cover, et cetera. And a lot of that’s gone away now with the advent of smartphones and telephone interconnects to alert the municipality of a problem, there’s computer programs now that can generate one message that’s sent out to all of the residents via their iPhones or home phones and really negates the need for any of the sirens to be used in an effort to take cover or for civil defense attack. It’s just a thing of the past now.

0:10:36 Richard Twomey: But for the fire departments, as I said, it’s still in primarily volunteer departments. They’re utilized. I know a great deal in Pennsylvania and in New York state and then in parts of New Jersey where there’s bad phone coverage or just as a backup. And in the advent of insurance ratings, the insurance services office, which establishes insurance rates for every individual city and town. And it’s what your fire insurance ratings are based on and what you’re going to pay on a premium is all determined by what the class of your community is.

0:11:16 Richard Twomey: And in some of these places where the sirens are utilized for alerting volunteers, it’s considered a secondary circuit above and beyond the pagers and the iPhones. So that in the event, as I said before, the paging system goes down, you still have an ability where somebody’s going to hear the whistle and know that there’s an alarm to head to the station. But these are primarily utilized in all volunteer departments.

0:11:39 Sophie Eden: Wonderful. That’s very interesting. And the other sirens that you’ve restored, were they all the federal signal manufacturer?

0:11:53 Richard Twomey: Yeah, it was basically, federal signal was the most popular from about 1950 onward, and they’d made things back in forties and during World War II, but they really came to be the premier manufacturer of these whistles. In the 1950s, they were all over the country, and you’ll still see them abandoned on poles and in places that just let them go. After the 1990s is pretty much when they started to fall off the radar screen and when nobody was maintaining them or utilizing them anymore, as with the advent of the smartphones. But in major metropolitan cities, and a lot of people that grew up during the Cold War can tell you this, that those metropolitan cities had sirens all over the place.

0:12:37 Richard Twomey: And at twelve noon every Wednesday, those sirens activated for about 30 seconds just to test, to make sure that they were working. And a lot of them were located at schools or at fire stations or police headquarters, municipal buildings, any place of public gatherings. Many of the towns tried to spread them evenly so that they would be heard in the event of an attack. And as the 1960s came to a close, they really started to fall off the radar in terms of maintenance. And then by 1990, people pretty much really didn’t do anything with them.

0:13:10 Richard Twomey: Also, part of the reason why they’re not utilized anymore is that a lot of the circuitry to start and stop them came over the telephone lines. And a lot of the old copper wires are not being maintained by Verizon anymore. And it was a certain special circuit that had to come out of the telephone central office in order to activate them the right way for alert, attack, take cover, or a fire call. And once those telephone lines were disconnected, it was really rather difficult to get these to activate. So some of them have been converted over to radio wave activation, utilizing a control box and a receiver at the site. And then they activate, and that’s the way that they’re tapped out now.

0:13:53 Richard Twomey: But federal signal, for the most part, still makes one or two models of these units that are still sold for tornado warning out in the Midwest and so forth. But the four models that they used, including the one that I did for Jamesburg, are really not utilized anymore. There’s only one of the four that’s still being manufactured the same way, but the parts were still available for a long time. I was able to get pieces to get these things rebuilt and restored, but even that’s starting to dwindle now because the technology is old technology.

0:14:27 Richard Twomey: But in the case of the Jamesburg borough, the fire siren has always been a fabric of the town. The town had people that worked there and were on the volunteer fire department that worked in the hardware stores and the restaurants and so forth in the town. And when there was a fire call, you knew it because the alarm was going. And as the mayor told me after we put it back up, it’s been part of the town’s fabric since the 1930s. And it’s good that we have this back up again, because it’s something that the town’s people always knew about.

0:14:59 Richard Twomey: And the kids were always taught that when the siren rang, to get off the streets and to watch out for the firemen that were responding to the firehouse and then to the call. And it’s old technology the way it is still in a lot of places that can’t afford to put on career fire departments. And it’s still a part of the fabric of this town. And I was just happy to help them out with getting it done.

0:15:21 Sophie Eden: That’s fantastic. And that’s really cool history. Since you’ve been in this fire department space for a while, is there something that you miss back when you started your career that is no longer here?

0:15:38 Richard Twomey: Riding on the back of the fire truck. That has to be. The one thing that I can tell you is one thing that I miss. I mean, not on cold nights when it was sub zero, but as a kid, it was a lot of excitement to go down the road, but it. It was just absolutely so unsafe and just not something you’d want any of your kids doing at this point in time. But it was different times back then, and the fire service certainly has evolved and changed for the better. We’re a lot safer now, I think. We’re especially with health and being proactive with cancer screenings and so forth. We didn’t have that years ago, and many people passed away from the things that they were exposed to.

0:16:21 Richard Twomey: Also. The advent of women in the fire service has been a great plus. I’ve been in three departments where we had a good female contingency. I’ve always mentored and tried to encourage them to move up the ladder, and they have. These women do a phenomenal job for the fire service now. And it’s great that what started as a wave in the 80s, we’re getting people into the upper management and chiefs ranks that are females, and it’s a great thing for progress in the fire service.

0:16:53 Sophie Eden: That’s brilliant. Very happy to hear everything is getting safer overall. That’s really great that the technology is being utilized in that way and fire engines are getting safer too. And protocols with that. How did you learn about municipal government auctions for finding the federal signal sirens?

0:17:18 Richard Twomey: You know, Sophie, I got to tell you, it was just by chance. And I’ve followed Municibid now for about three years and haven’t started bidding on things about two years ago. And it’s great that Municibid is in the area. That it serves New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania. You’re expanding to other places now, and it just makes it very easy to get on and look for something. I really feel that Municibid is more of a mom and pop shop that gives you great customer service. I’ve never had any problems with Municibid itself.

0:17:54 Richard Twomey: I’ve had one problem where I put a digit in wrong on a wire transfer and it was returned to me. I was calling to let them know it may go beyond the deadline and it may not, and thank God it did not. But I was able to just get a note put into the file so they knew where that the payment was coming. But this now makes it very easy to find surplus equipment that you can use. And without looking, I would say there were ten to twelve items I’ve purchased from Municibid that went back to fire departments for either historical restoration use or direct equipment that could be utilized still for certain departments. I bought a number of flashlights for a department that really didn’t have a lot of money. And we’re able to equip every member with a light on their jacket now that they didn’t have before. And it’s just that the monies have to be spent now into compliance with the turnout gear regulations and the helmets and the boots and the gloves. And it’s major money now.

0:18:53 Richard Twomey: It’s not chump change like it used to be when I was younger. And getting into this, you got a pair of boots, a rubber coat, and a leather helmet, and you went to work and that was it.

0:19:03 Sophie Eden: What advice would you give to people new to government auctions that were just starting to look for items?.

0:19:11 Richard Twomey: Well, I’ve been doing this for about 40 years now. I’ve been attending vehicle auctions to procure cars for the fire department, and we actually repurchased fire trucks to put back in service because the cost of new ones are so expensive. And for a support type of truck or a utility truck or a brush truck, there’s plenty of them out there through the municipal auction sites that you can repurpose for little money. And if you’re only running a handful of those types of calls, or 20 or 30 of them a year, what is the economic return on going out and spending a lot of money on something that you don’t use that much? So these auctions are a great window for companies that don’t have a lot of money to go out and procure equipment.

0:19:58 Richard Twomey: It’s just been a phenomenal way to find things, because prior to this, in the 80s, if you were looking for a piece of equipment, there was a publication called the Pennsylvania Fireman, and you would go to that publication to look for any kind of surplus property you could use. There really was no posting other than maybe getting onto an auction company that was large and getting their publication and maybe another place where you could get a publication and try to look for these things.

0:20:26 Richard Twomey: I remember picking up one of these sirens that I first refurbished out of a fire journal in Maryland and made contact with the owners and purchased them and reused them. But prior to this, there really wasn’t much for auctions aside from what we have now with online. You had to physically know somebody that was in the auction world and where the auction was being held. And sometimes it was conducive to you being there, sometimes it wasn’t. You’d miss out on something if you couldn’t get off from work to go and do what you had to do to procure the item. So having online auctions has been a very big help. And I know that after the advent of COVID and everybody being home, a lot of things went to that.

0:21:11 Richard Twomey: Public auctions especially, have gone to that. So I’ve noticed a big difference there. But as far as anybody going to bid on municipal properties, I would think the first thing you want to do is look at the value of what it is new, compare it with the age of what’s being offered. Is there work to be done on it? Is it broken? Does it need to be restored? Is it something you can do economically? And if not, then if you have to give it out to somebody to do it, is it really worth the effort? Of restoring that rather than buying it new, and that becomes the issue with it. You also don’t want to go above and beyond your means for purchasing it.

0:21:51 Richard Twomey: Sometimes I’ve watched auctions go to levels that I know that the piece of equipment isn’t worth it and people will bid it up just for the sake of bidding it up. And the other thing is just, you don’t want to be a sniper at your neighbors because eventually somebody’s going to come and do it to you. So don’t drive the price up on something that you’re not willing to pay for because the auction sites will shut you down pretty quick for doing that, especially if you don’t pay.

0:22:18 Richard Twomey: And you definitely want to bid on something, have the means to pay for it right away and get it picked up within the time frame and get it done.

0:22:26 Sophie Eden: For people that are looking at getting into the fire protection industry space, what tips would you give them as they just start to enter this world?

0:22:40 Richard Twomey: Well, I think it’s to have an open mind. That’s for starters. There’s many areas of the fire service where you can excel. Many fire departments have taken over the emergency medical care response for EMS. And I’ve known a lot of good, intelligent, smart paramedics that have gone into medical care that could be doctors if they really wanted to be. And there’s always that niche to what you want to go into, whether it’s administration or fleet services or fire prevention and protection or maybe field training.

0:23:16 Richard Twomey: There’s many divisions within the fire department where people can excel. And I’ve known people that have gone to engineering schools that are chiefs aides in the city of New York, and people who have gone and gotten their degrees for electrical or mechanical engineering, and they’re firefighters. And on their days off from the fire department, when they’re on a four platoon shift or a three platoon shift, they go and they work electrical work or do something to stay active and keep their minds going.

0:23:44 Richard Twomey: And the fire service is a great way to get into. Do what you want to do with your life and to help people out and to excel, and you can make a good living doing it. You can meet a lot of good people doing it. Friends, they’re like family. It’s like having a second family. So that’s my recommendation. If you’re going to do it, look at all the avenues that are available and stick with it. The training initially is tough, but if you stick through it, it’s like anything else.

0:24:14 Richard Twomey: You’ll succeed. And that goes the same way for college, I mean, I got out of school and struggled with math and science, but I struggled for those years. But I made it through as an engineer, and to this day, I’m still doing it.

0:24:26 Sophie Eden: Can you talk a little bit about the volunteer versus career space? Because something that I was hearing was talking with a paramedic who was saying they’re getting a lot less applications, like for firefighters and paramedics, and that also the volunteer base has declined as well. So I was wondering if you could share your experience with that.

0:24:53 Richard Twomey: The volunteer base started deteriorating probably just prior to 911, and we saw a little bit of resurgence. And I always thought that just as Pearl harbor was to the World War II veterans who stepped up and served their country and went to war and gave their lives up for the country, that we would see the same kind of resurgence. And I know the military did. We lost a lot of young people fighting the wars that we’ve had in the last couple of years, which to me is a personal tragedy, knowing I had family that fought in World War II.

0:25:27 Richard Twomey: So I see that there was some resurgence, but not what I think everybody expected. And nowadays they are seeing less applicants in some of the smaller jurisdictions, but the larger jurisdictions are still seeing a lot of applicants come through. I know the city of New York has, I don’t know what the numbers were, but it was a staggering number of applicants to what they had available for spots. So it was always a very coveted assignment to work for the city of New York. But other major metropolitan fire departments do get people in because the salaries are good and the benefits are excellent, et cetera. But some of the smaller municipalities and counties and statewide agencies don’t see that influx of people anymore because there’s just other careers out there and nobody’s really geared to go into this anymore. Nobody really wants to put the effort in. It’s physically demanding, it’s mentally demanding at times.

0:26:28 Richard Twomey: You’re seeing people at the worst of their lives sometimes, and there’s a lot of negative things you see, but you try to render assistance and you try to make outcomes come better for people, and that’s what you’re there for. But not everybody is geared or built for that, and it’s tough to try to find people these days to do that. As far as the decline in volunteerism goes, as I said, I saw the decline prior to 911, and it just really was not as it was in the years prior to that, because you went to a fire school, say, on the weekends from eight in the morning till twelve noon, and they gave you the basic National Fire Protection Association’s firefighter training.

0:27:14 Richard Twomey: And that was one semester, say, four months of going on Sunday mornings, and you learned the basics, and you learned how to do it, and the rest was just, here’s your coat, here’s your helmet, your boots. Get on the truck when the alarm goes in, and you’ll learn. And that’s pretty much the way I was trained at the beginning, but I was lucky to be in a department that really emphasized training and keeping up with the standards of the time.

0:27:36 Richard Twomey: We had a very good department with a lot of very good people, and I attribute the success of that department to all the people who had served in World War II and Korea and Vietnam. They were very good people. They were hardworking people. A lot of them were working class people. The guy who taught me how to fight fire inside of buildings was a custodian in the school system locally who fought in Vietnam, and he was an amazing person, and so were all the other people I was down there with. But the military people is what I attributed to the success of the department, and that’s really across the board. We get a lot of people that do apply that are former military, and they’re some of the best people because they’ve gone through the conditioning of boot camp or basic training with the navy or the air force and the marine corps. So those people are always a success.

0:28:28 Richard Twomey: And I would encourage anybody who’s been in the military, if they come out and they want to look at some kind of a vocation and job, that the fire service and emergency medical work is where it’s at. As far as that goes, a lot of police departments pick up former military people. So the volunteer service, I don’t know that it’s on a decline because of the amount of, as I said before, the training was easier years ago.

0:28:55 Richard Twomey: Nowadays, you’re looking at going for almost six months, sometimes three nights a week, depending on the number of hours, sometimes down to two or three months if you’re going four days a week or sometimes at night, sometimes there’s accelerated classes that you’re going five days a week like it’s a job, and you’ll get out earlier. In the state of New Jersey, we have firefighter one and firefighter two.

0:29:22 Richard Twomey: Those two classes are being combined into one so that people are technically savvy when they get out and they know what they’re doing. So we’ve had some changes in the state regs, but the problem is now people are, in this economy, are having to work two and three different jobs to stay ahead. They don’t have the kind of time that we did back in the 80s with only working one job and then going home and doing what you had to do.

0:29:43 Richard Twomey: It’s changed a great deal. And I don’t think that the volunteer service is going to be able to keep up with the time demands, especially on people that have to work two and three jobs.

0:29:53 Sophie Eden: It’s a tough job and a tough space all around. Any last thoughts that you’d like to share about fire protection service or the structural engineering that you’d like to share with our audience?

0:30:07 Richard Twomey: Well, just that I’ve enjoyed my career, but I’ve enjoyed also doing the things I did with public auctions. It’s really been kind of an aside. Engineering work can be pretty demanding. I spend a lot of time working extra hours doing it. So when I’m not doing it, I want to do something with my time that’s got some good for the general public. And some of the work I’ve done with public auctions has been kind of a stress relief and time better spent, as far as I’m concerned, until I retire.

0:30:38 Richard Twomey: It certainly has been a lot of fun attending these auctions. And as I said before, I check municipal site once a week just to see if something comes up. But just by dumb luck is what happened with this fire siren. And I was able to help these people out, procure it, drive up there, get it, restore it, put it in service, and it’s quite loud, and some of the neighbors really don’t like it sometimes. They’ve told me that in the past few months, they’ve gotten some rather negative feedback about the whistle from some of the neighbors in town. And there’s always, for some reason, one or two comments that are negative, and then you’re going to get ten people coming back on them for even mentioning it because they’re volunteers and it’s good support from the community. But the back and forth is kind of enjoyable at times.

0:31:27 Sophie Eden: Yes. I mean, it is a siren. It’s incredibly loud, and I imagine if there’s someone living right next to it.

0:31:36 Richard Twomey: Yes. Right behind it. As a matter of fact, if I was them, I would be moving. The downfall is that when we found the whistle, it was a 10 hp siren, and the one prior to that was only 5 hp, so it wasn’t as loud as this one is now. But they’re not running as many alarms as they did years ago. We’ve put some career personnel on in the surrounding towns, and they’re not having to go out of their jurisdiction. Very much so.

0:32:02 Richard Twomey: I was going to suggest to them that if they were still running that level of alarms to at least just turn it off between 10:00 p.m. And 06:00 a.m. But nobody wants to hear any of that. I’ve got a great company, and you do a lot of great work with municipal reuse. And I know that there’s a lot of people that, especially in volunteer organizations, that reuse this equipment. And there’s a plethora of stuff out there, from street lights to park benches to whatever.

0:32:29 Richard Twomey: If you’re looking for something that you got to try to get cheaper, this is the place to do it. And I think it really is an easy to use website. It’s easy to get things paid for and it’s easy to get things picked up once you have an established purchase date and so forth.

0:32:46 Sophie Eden: Thank you so much, Richard. And thank you for your service and the time and resources that you’re donating to these fire departments like Jamesburg. I think your story helps show others that each person can make a difference and in their communities and in other communities, and that it really has an impact on other people’s lives. So thank you so much for your service. Been an absolute pleasure chatting with you. Really appreciate it.

0:33:21 Richard Twomey: I appreciate the time today. It was great talking with you.

0:33:39 Sophie Eden: Thank you for tuning in to the Municibid Podcast. If you’d like to learn more about the world of government surplus, be sure to subscribe to this podcast. Wherever you listen to your podcast.