Two people were displaced Wednesday night after a fire at a Waco apartment. Firefighters were called out to the Abbey Glenn apartments on South 4th Street in Waco at around 8:30 p.m. They were able to put the fire out in five minutes. No one was home at the time and no injuries were reported. The cause is under investigation.  

VIDEO: Inside an antique firehouse in Humble, kids become firefighters. "Your children can dress up in costume," explained firehouse owner Tom Morrison to a mother and her two daughters. There are antique firetrucks, toys, and firefighter memorabilia. It's a lifelong collection for Morrison. "We thought that would be a perfect solution to get our collection out in public and children exposed to the way they used to fight fires," said Morrison. For the past 10 years, the Morrisons have hosted birthday parties and events at the firehouse. "Everything here is interactive. Children can come in dressed like firefighters, climb on the fire trucks, ring the bells," expressed Morrison. "Kids can climb on theses real antique fire trucks, while wearing firefighting suits."  

Firefighters quickly put out a fire at a single-family residence in Grapevine Wednesday morning. Firefighters responded to the 1900 block of Stafford Road at about 9:00 a.m., Assistant Fire Chief John Sherwood said. When crews arrived, they observed heavy smoke coming from the garage. The residents were home at the time of the fire. No injuried were reported. The fire mainly damaged the garage, but there was light smoke damage inside the residence as well, Sherwood said. According to Sherwood, the residence is probably still uninhabitable.  

Alleging that "extensive publicity" has made a fair trial impossible, the attorney for Emond Johnson – the man accused of setting a blaze in 2017 that killed San Antonio Firefighter Scott Deem – submitted a motion this week to move the trial "to a county in which it presents the possibility" for him to "receive a fair and impartial jury." Johnson was indicted by a Bexar County Jury in December of 2017 on arson charges related to the May, 2017 fire at Ingram Square shopping center that killed Deem and injured two other firefighters. Johnson was the owner of the Spartan Box gym, where the fire was started. "The amount of publicity, the overwhelming presence on social media and the unending media coverage require this change of venue," the motion states, pointing to community support for SAFD following the incident more than two years ago.  

First responders rush through the streets to save lives every day, but that comes with a risk and, sometimes, a cost. With more than 30 crashes involving Jacksonville police and fire vehicles last week, city leaders are once again concerned about safety. The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office alone had 24 crashes last week, with the officers at fault in 17 of them. Jacksonville Fire-Rescue vehicles were involved in seven additional crashes, and five were found to be the firefighters' fault. Because of past incidents and maintenance, 54 JSO vehicles are out of service out of 1,700 vehicles in its fleet. An additional 22 JFRD and 79 other city vehicles are offline for maintenance. Earlier this year, the I-Team reported that crashes of city vehicles cost taxpayers an average of more than $1.5 million each year.  

Ever wonder how fire agencies decide who and when to evacuate? It's not a decision made on a hunch. It requires making sense of huge amounts of real-time data and intelligence, and getting it wrong or late can have tragic consequences. Not than long ago, fatalities in California's wildfires were very rare. But the rapidly accelerating pace and size of fires in the state has taken a heavy toll. Last year's Camp Fire left more than 80 people dead and all but wiped out the town of Paradise. The Tubbs Fire, which ravaged wine country in 2017, resulted in more than 20 deaths. And the Woolsey Fire destroyed more than 1,600 homes in Ventura County last fall, leaving three people dead in its wake. To help minimize this loss of life and property, the Los Angeles Fire Department and other agencies use cutting-edge technology to model and predict what a fire's going to do next and use that information to figure out who needs to evacuate.  

If you have a heart attack in Harlowe, according to resident and former firefighter Rufus Carter, you are in serious trouble: it's going to take the ambulance an average of 18 minutes and 22 seconds to get there. If you live in nearby Adams Creek, the response time is even longer. That's the longest average response time for EMS in the county by nine and a half minutes (in Fort Barnwell) and nearly 11 minutes longer than the county's quickest (Township 7). While the Harlowe and Adams Creek community has its own fire department, it must rely on Havelock EMS for ambulance calls. Many in the community think its time for that change. "EMS is needed here," Carter, one resident leading the push, said. He said the county commissioners have been reluctant to raise the community's taxes to cover a local EMS base – "It would raise the taxes up from 1 to 5 cents," he believes – but he feels that wouldn't matter. "What's more important? A life, or raising the tax?"  

Chicago has the largest number of women fighting fires and working on ambulances of any city in the country, the city's fire commissioner said Wednesday, but they make up less than 10% of the department's total personnel. In a department that has long dealt with diversity issues, aldermen also pressed Chicago Fire Department officials to better address the under-representation of black and Latino firefighters on the force, an annual complaint when officials come to City Hall for their budget hearing. Commissioner Richard Ford II called on aldermen to help get more minorities to take tests to get on the force. "When we do our outreach for recruitment, we really don't have control over who is coming in to take this test," Ford said. "What I would like to do is work with the aldermen, work with (Department of Human Resources) to increase that list, and thereby increase the diversity."  

The California wildfires and PG&E's incompetence are having a terrifying impact on the residents of California, who face not only immense risk to life and property, but a growing number of power and telecom-related outages that make a bad problem worse. There are more than a dozen wildfires currently raging across California, and heavy winds this week are only expected to exacerbate the problem. PG&E plans to cut power to more than half a million California residents this week as the ill-prepared company attempts to mitigate harm caused by its antiquated infrastructure. The fires and power outages are also having a profound impact on the state's telecom networks. According to data released by the FCC, 874 of the state's 26,000 cell sites were out on Monday, up from 630 on Sunday. Given the majority of these sites have no backup power, they're useless once fire or PG&E's rolling blackouts come knocking.