SUMNER COUNTY, Tenn. (WKRN) — A husband and wife watched their home burn down Tuesday; firefighters less than two miles away were not allowed to respond.
The fire ignited inside the garage as homeowner Ray Rainey was turning on his Jeep. Rainey had to helplessly watch the home he built with his own hands in 2006 turn to ash.
“I’m mad as hell. Hendersonville Fire Department one mile up the street can’t come down and help [the] volunteer fire department,” Rainey told News 2.
Hendersonville mayor Jamie Clary blamed a years-long dispute over jurisdiction between the Hendersonville Fire Department and the Shackle Island Volunteer Fire Department. According to Clary, the Hendersonville Fire Department worked on “mutual aid” agreements with two volunteer fire stations in 2023.
One station accepted the agreement, but the Shackle Island Volunteer Fire Department did not.
“We told them, at that point, that meant that we were not going to respond to structure fires,” Clary said.
Without a mutual aid agreement in place with the Shackle Island Volunteer Fire Department, Hendersonville Fire was unable to respond to Tuesday’s structure fire as Rainey’s home was located less than a half a mile outside the city’s limits.
“We’re very willing to sit down with them [the Shackle Island Volunteer Fire Department] again because we don’t want this to happen again. We want to be able to go out there and help our neighbors,” Clary said. “We’re hearing from some of the folks on the Shackle Island [Volunteer Fire Department] Board of Directors that they didn’t know what kind of agreement that we were willing to sign and the flexibility that we had in there and that’s disappointing to find out.”
One possible hold-up to any agreement would be the question of which department would take the lead on emergency calls if the Hendersonville Fire Department was able to assist.
“I am not going to put my firefighters and our resources — that should be focused on the citizens of Hendersonville — we’re not going to put those under the command of volunteers that may have no training and no experience,” Clary explained.
Until Tuesday, Rainey was unaware that the two fire departments were at odds with one another.
“A little old argument between goofballs burned down the house,” Rainey continued. “It’s all gone.”
Shackle Island Volunteer Fire Chief, Ron Wills, told News 2 that the Shackle Island Volunteer Fire Department is not required to sign a mutual aid agreement with any other fire department. Wills added that the Shackle Island Volunteer Fire Department would assist Hendersonville Fire if needed even if the Hendersonville Fire Department would not assist them in turn.
In a statement to News 2, Chief Wills added:
“I have been with the department for 31 years, and Hendersonville City and SIFD have been mutually responding to each other the entire time with no agreement in place.
Why the City of Hendersonville is not interested in providing and receiving mutual aid from us is still unknown to us at SIFD. We have said all along, even though we were not comfortable signing the agreement that they offered, that we would still be happy to respond in mutual aid to them at any time. We also offered them an identical copy of the mutual aid agreement that we signed with the other neighboring city and they refused to sign that agreement with us.
There is no need for a written agreement in order to provide mutual aid to our neighboring departments or any other department. We have even sent a team to Gatlinburg a few years ago to assist them along with hundreds of other departments. None of us were concerned about a written mutual aid agreement then, and we aren’t now.
If the City of Hendersonville is interested in discussing returning to mutually aiding each other, we are now, as we always have been, open to building that bridge.”
